Video Game Influences
Video Gamers have the Advantage Since the early 1970’s, the demand and popularity of video games has been growing rapidly. Nowadays, video games are an integral part of many people’s lives world-wide. In order to satisfy the public’s growing demand for these innovative games, software companies are producing large quantities of attractive and stimulating video games. With each new generation, these games become more visually dazzling and increase in realism. Because the vast majority of children play video games, questions have been raised as to the effects of partaking in this form of recreational activity and whether parents should allow their children to participate. Although some negative aspects of video game playing have been theorized, parents should not only allow, but rather encourage their children to play video games because these games increase a person’s ability to concentrate and create an environment that fosters successful learning. Playing video games increases a person’s visual attention and awareness. The Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester conducted a series of tests to examine, as Green and Bavelier put it, “[potential] consequences on perceptual and motor skills” caused by playing action video games. In these tests, two groups of people participated. The first group of participants consisted of people that did not play video games. The second group was made up of avid video game players that played at least one hour four days a week. Green and Bavelier explained that they implemented four complex experiments designed “to determine whether video-game playing produces an overall increase in attentional capacity” (1). In other words, they wanted to see if playing action video games could increase a person’s ability to process and comprehend visual material. In the data gathered from these experiments, the group of video gamers outperformed the non-video gamers by a large margin. This
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