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Benefits Of Video Games

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Introduction Action video games, which are categorized by fighting, shooting, or platform-style games, have come to dominate the gaming industry in the 21st century. Both parents and politicians alike have accused action games for causing antisocial, violent and even addictive behavior in gamers. This fear over video games fueled early research efforts to prove that violent video games were as damaging as claims would suggest. Many studies claim to show an overall negative psychological effect on the player, citing examples such as increased aggression and long-term harm to mental stability. However, recently, both gamers and game developers have defended action games with claims that they make the player “smarter”. This has sparked the …show more content…

If this trend were to continue, research can change the public’s opinion on action games while encouraging video game developers themselves to make games that yield more benefits for the players.

Perceptual Learning Effects One of the earliest studies on action video games, Greenfield et al. (1994), found that such games facilitate visual attention and decrease response times to an expected stimulus. Although these findings were not large enough to suggest a significant cognitive benefit from video games, it paved the way for many similar studies to come. For example, Green et al. in 2006 argued that action gaming enhances visuospatial attention throughout the visual field. In their study, gamers exhibited an enhancement in attentional resources and accuracy compared with non-gamers, not only in the periphery but also in central vision. This established that playing video games really did improve mental growth, even if just with everyday skills. However, research around this time began to argue that video games created psychological harms for the player. In 2004, a meta-analysis conducted by Craig Anderson and Karen Dill studied the effects of violent video games on a player’s psyche. The study found that these games led to an increase to aggressive behavior and aggressive cognition, meaning the player was more likely to engage in violent

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