Video games Essay Example for Free

Video games Essay Today, video games have become the most popular means of entertainment throughout our world. More than three-quarters of American youths have video-game consoles, and on a typical day at least 40 percent play a video game. Moreover, recently there has been a wide range of studies by professors throughout the world all focusing on the idea of whether or not video games are causing the youth to become a more illogical violent society in the future. Moreover, some people believe they are just a waste of precious time. However, they have been proven by many scholars that they are not only the best means of entertainment, but also one of the best sources of learning and improving brain performance and strategies, speed of alertness and decision making, and problem solving skills. Coming up with good strategies can be very handy for our lives whether it be in business, learning, teaching, etc. Nowadays video games have been proved to make people smarter towards creative strategy thinking. For example, it has been stated that â€Å"While there are many games that place a premium on strategy, most set an overall goal and give the gamer numerous ways in which he or she can achieve that goal. † Vila, Monica. 7 Reasons Why Your Son Should Play Video Games. http://www. babble. com/. N. p. , 04 Feb 2013. Web. 4 Nov. 2013. Video games teach kids to think objectively about both the games themselves and their own performance. In addition, players also get instant feedback on their decisions and quickly learn their own strengths and weaknesses through try and error since they get unlimited lives in a video game. Video games have a great effect on the youth regarding decision making. Some researchers compared action video-gamers and non-gamers with a series of simple decision-making experiments. Gamers devoted at least five hours weekly in the year before the experiment to playing action video games, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Halo 2. They presented volunteers with arrays of dots, asked them to identify which way the dots were moving, and varied the number of dots moving in the same direction to make the task easier or harder. Video games get kids to think. There are dozens of video games that are specifically geared towards learning, but even the most basic shooter game teaches kids to think logically and quickly process large amounts of data. Rather than passively absorbing content from, say, a TV show, a video game requires the player’s constant input to tell the story. Moreover, well known sources such as the video games CQ research proved this characteristic about video gaming â€Å"Games stress taking your knowledge and applying it. That’s pretty crucial in the modern world,† says University of Wisconsin Professor of Reading James Gee. † Glazer, Sarah. Video Games. Congressional Quarterly, 2006. 939. Print. Indeed, the argument that video and computer games are superior to school in helping children learn as gaining currency in academic circles. Claimed benefits include improved problem-solving, mastery of scientific investigation and the ability to apply information learned to real-life situations. In conclusion, as you have seen, there is more than just killing and violence in video games. Our future children should be more exposed to video games not only for ways of entertainment, but also for the sake of improving their intelligence whether it be in creating new strategies, enhancing problem solving skills, or even allowing them to make better life decisions.