Video Games Are Not A Waste Of Time Analysis

In Support of Video Games
Why Videogames Are Not a Waste of Time Video games are no longer the uprising form of media that ill informed parents and scientists used to fear; video games are now an established form of entertainment that is just as universally accepted as film or literature. The difference between videogames and mediums like film and literature is that they do not have the higher value that books have in exercising the mind and communicating information, nor do they have the value that films have to intellectually challenge an audience and to make people think. This is the general argument that can be heard voiced by leading intellectuals in various field as well as parents who are rising young children; both claim that videogames

Steven Johnson (2006), author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, argued against the consensus amongst the general population saying, “The most debased forms of mass diversion--video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcom-- turn out to be nutritional after all. For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ‘masses’ want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.” (pg. 9) It is imperative to understand that people do not like new things because it changes what is already known, and that when new mediums become popular they are liable to be compared to the previous medium. Take books for example, there are many studies published that conclude that reading is good for the brain; that reading not only provides information but that-- because of the concentration required to focus on text for extended periods of time and the stimulation in the areas of

Video Games have been accused of making youth violent and aggressive, making people isolate themselves from society, and for lowering the attention span and the ability to concentrate in youth. These claims have yet to be supported by several well organized studies and have never been more than a correlation to any of these claims, and in fact have been disproven on several occasions. Adam Eichenbaum (2014), author contributing to the American Journal of Play, concluded a discussion on the research on video games say that “Today’s video games are much more than entertainment. They are also weapons in the fight against declining mental capacities in old age. They promote job-related skills. And they are a model of how to teach children complex and difficult tasks and abilities. As with any technology, video games are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad.” (pg. 67) Video games are not the waste of time that they are accused of being, nor are they damping the development of today’s youth. If anything is to be said about video games is that in them lays a great potential for good; that video games serve as tools for people who want to make a change in society, whether the changes are positive or negative lie in the hands of those that choose to use video games as tools. These are not unrealistic or histrionic claims; video games, after all, are more than just