Video Games Beneficial Essay

How Video Games can be Beneficial

Despite what the media says, video games can have positive effects on children, or at least that’s what a study performed by Digital Creativity Labs at York University had to say. A study was conducted to try and establish a connection between video games, strategy, and intelligence. The researchers of the study focused on the most “problematic” genre of video games on the market, first-person-shooters or FPSs. The tests will also consist of MOBA’s Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas. First-person-shooters, as well as MOBAs, are typically played in a multiplayer format, two teams trying to score the most points possible by trying to kill one another or use teamwork to complete an objective. These games typically

These effects come from the types of games kids or teenagers play, specifically “shooter” games these games can have positive effects on neural processing. Espejo touches on this in the book, “For example, a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study found that the mechanisms that control attention allocation (e.g., the frontal parietal network) were less active during a challenging pattern detection task in regular gamers than nongamers, leading the researchers to suggest that shooter game players allocate their attentional resources more efficiently and filter out irrelevant information more effectively.” (Espejo p.13, 2015) This information conveys the idea that gamers that play shooter games have the ability to block out unnecessary information when needed, and to have that skill can be invaluable in day to day life. Blocking out unneeded information can be passively applied in the workplace when there is much to be done, or when you have a list of priorities to attend to and you need to narrow down what is most important in a swift and efficient manner. However, these effects aren’t seen in less fast paced games such as puzzle or role playing games, it is believed that these effects are seen predominantly in the shooter category is due to the fact that you have to make split second decisions and be able to react to small changes with

This study was conducted using 80 Ohio State students and they thought they’d be being paired with another student, when in fact it was a researcher wearing either an Ohio State shirt or a University of Michigan (Ohio State’s bitter rival’s) shirt. This test was ran similarly to the previous one, the two participants sat down and played a violent game together, in this case the game was “Unreal Tournament 3.” The participants would either play as rivals or teammates and the overall result was in fact a positive one. The cooperative group showed to be more likely to cooperate outside of the gaming environment even when, they thought they were playing with a rival student from the University of Michigan. The aggressiveness also dropped in cooperative players even if they were playing with a rival as stated by the article “'The cooperative play just wiped out any effect of who you were playing with,' Velez said.’ Ohio State students happily cooperated with Michigan fans.'” (Wrenn, 2012) Even the students who were playing as rivals at first eventually started to cooperate in real life games after the