Informative Essay: The Medicinal Uses Of Video Games

Medicinal Uses of Video Games

There are many people who say that videogames and TV will rot your brain and cause brain damage. Plenty of research and articles are against children playing video games, but there are some that are in favor of video games, and that number is growing every day. Video games can have some medicinal uses from helping patients in physical therapy to improving ones vison. Many people do not see these uses and for every one for video games there are five who are against it, however as that number is slowly growing.

When you think of children playing video games you probably think of a child sitting in front of a TV or monitor for hours on end. This is not the case with a lot of games. Now while there may be a fair amount of children who do this there are a lot who know how to moderate their gaming and exercise. Some medical professionals have actually recommend patients to play video games as part of their treatment.

Treatment can be very boring for some people especially when it comes to physical therapy. Physical therapy is defined as “Process of doing a group of repetitive exercises in order to regain the range of motion

lost due to an accident or injury” A lot of people do not complete their home exercises and therefore do not heal properly or take much longer to heal. Patient compliance can be as low as 30% for home exercises. Cosmin Mihaiu a member of the TED team talked about a video game he made that integrated an X-Box One Kinect system to track a patient’s movements. The video game can be programed to a wide variety of exercises for patients. (Mihaiu TED Talk)
One example he used in his TED Talk was an auction game where the player needs to stand up to bid on an item that they want and sit down to continue on to the next item. He continues to explain that this would be a great and interactive way for geriatric patients who need to do a sit and standing exercise. Another example he used was a game where you played as a bee that had to collect pollen and avoid other bugs and obstacles. You control the bee by doing a bicep curl exercise. One final example Mihaiu used was a game that had a sort of interactive doctor that would do the exercises with you. The main driving force behind these games and this invention is that Physical therapy can be very boring and making the exercise fun and interactive would help patients want to do their exercises especially at home when they don’t have a doctor next to them helping them.
Physical therapy isn’t the only medicinal use of video games. There are some studies that have shown that some types of video games can slightly improve vison. Amblyopia, commonly known as Lazy eye affects approximately three recent of children and is the leading cause of visual impairment. If left untreated past the age of seven, it is usually considered untreatable, however there have been several studies that indicate that first person shooter games or FPSs have shown to improve eyesight.
First Person Shooter games are very different from other games such as Platform games, Logic games, and Puzzle Games. They all are very slow pace and methodical. On average people who play these types of games have a larger Entorhinal Cortex. This is used in conjunction with the hippocampus to create maps and memories of your life and knowing when and where something happened as well as how it fits in to the time line of events. Logic games along with many other types of games also cause the brain to have more plasticity which helps the brain to change, adapt, and heal.
First Person Shooters differ from other types of games because they require a different approach as to how they are played. Unlike games such as Logic or RPGs, they are fast paced and require you to pay attention to a “whole field of vision” as stated by Maurer in her article. She explains a study where several participants were instructed to play 10 hours a week with no more than two hours a day. At the end of a month they participants had improved vison in certain tasks that they had difficulty in before.
Heather Fishel wrote an article about how patients who suffered from Amblyopia gained a thirty percent increase to their vison by playing the FPS Medal of Honor.

The patients were instructed to play for no more than two hours a day and by the end of the month patients with not only Amblyopia but Cataracts as well had improvements to their vison. She explains that “With frequent, sudden point-of-view changes and nonstop action, gamers must use an extreme amount of focus to catch every detail. This intense concentration hones the eyes and their muscles, training individuals to use their sharpened sight away from the TV as well.” She continues to explain that FPSs provide an adrenaline rush that also helps with brain plasticity. People who have 20/20 vison can also improve their vision beyond 20/20 if they play

FPSs.
Video may be seen as bad for people’s health, but they are starting to be used in medicinal settings to help patients recover from their ailments. If used in moderation I believe that they can be and will continue to be used. Video games are fun and interactive and more and more children are playing them and might as well reap the benefits while playing.