Are video games changing us?



It all starts at young ages.

 Are video games changing us?  This was a very interesting topic I came across because I have grown up on video games and can only read into the past to see if any kind of changes are occurring.  This all started in the late 70’s when the Atari 2600 was released which was followed by the original Nintendo system in 1986.  Since then there have been many different kinds of gaming systems along with thousands upon thousands of games to play.  We are making history at this exact moment because no one knows how the video game generations will turn out.

I can admit that I have an addictive personality and that it possibly all started back in the late 80’ when I first received a Nintendo system as a Christmas present.  I had no clue what the thing was because I was only four years old the time.  The system had all sorts of wires and looked so alien to me.  But once my father plugged everything up and inserted the video game Mario Bro’s I became hooked.  This did not help me through my years of elementary school for I would always be daydreaming of how to beat the next level of whatever game I was playing at the time.  What made video games even more fun was hooking up a second controller and player with or against your friend.  This brought a few more key aspects into the expanding video game world attracting more players in that socializing, team play, and competition are qualities that most humans desire.  Being that I was already in love with gaming, this only made it one hundred times better.  But what does this all mean, are all gamers alike being trained in different ways for some kind of futuristic jobs or is it all just entertainment?

Over 60% of the United States population has fooled around with some kind of video game and more than 50% of kids age’s four to six have played.  Boys in particular are putting aside the puzzles, action figures, and legos and immersing themselves with video gaming.   The kids today most likely have parents who have played or still do play video games.  The average age of a typical gamer is twenty nine years of old and seventeen percent of that crowd is over fifty.  A whole generation of kids knows the famous John Madden from his NFL football video game, not of his early playing years, coaching, or announcing Monday night football games.  Young adults can even make careers out of playing video games such as Madden NFL where thousands of dollars of prize money is put up for a tournament.  With so many people playing video games it has become the new normality. 

Some researchers are saying video games are affecting young kid’s creativity, empathy, and attention.  This is still trying to be validated but teachers say that they do not need to wait for the results.  According to an elementary teacher, the kids that are obsessed with gaming are easily identifiable for their participation and attention in class is negligible.  These kids are also said to be unable to sit still, have no patience, and a lot of the time are even overweight.  A mother of such an obsessed child says that when she watches her kid play, the adolescent looks like a “mini worker bee” with his eyes bonded to the screen, oblivious to the real world, and interacting at lightning speed with his buddies playing the game. 

What if these kids are playing a violent video game, how will it affect them?  Researchers are still up in the air over this controversial issue but the first person shooter game Doom did not stop a fourteen year old kid from shooting up his school killing three girls back in 1997.  The shooter, Michael Carneal, told authorities that he learned to shoot from playing the video game Doom.  According to Dave Grossman, a retired US Army Ranger who studies psychologically aggressive behavior, violent video games desensitize the gamer to the act of killing. This can affect all players across the board in that they will be more tolerant to violence in the real world. 

Plugging in and escaping harsh realities.

I can vividly remember the moment I said to myself that I would never stop playing video games.  I was sitting in the family room in my little kid chair at five years old playing a brand new game called Super Mario Bro’s 3.  My father walks in and tells me that someday I will get too old to play these games and won’t enjoy them anymore.  In the back of my mind I told myself there was no way I would ever quit, I loved gaming more than anything.  To this day I still enjoy video games, but not to the extreme of my past experience.  Playing those games may have affected my school work but they did not make me a violent person, though you could say I am desensitized.  But thinking back, gaming made everything simpler like an escape from reality.  Maybe that is a big part of the future, a world of virtual reality for those that either need training or an escape from the real world violence.

Citation:

Mayor, T. (2005, February 20). What are Video Games turning us into? The Boston Globe. Retrieved December 1,2010, from the Factiva Database.

Picture of child in front of television retrieved December 1, 2010 from the World Wide Web. http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/addicted-to-video-games-lawsuit.jpg

Picture of teen in corner of a room retrieved December 1, 2010 from the World Wide Web. http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/videogame_addict.jpg