Stefanos Demetriou

Anything you read below in this article is an opinion and as an opinion that it is you are free to disagree, criticize me and flame me behind my back. There is an overall negative spirit when it comes to the social acceptance of gaming.  I will continue by saying why I believe that this is in some cases wrong, by defining some gaming’s pros and cons.  Please note that here I will only speak for multiplayer gaming.  Whenever I say gaming, or games, I am referring to the act where a group of individuals are playing together an electronic game.

First of all, electronic gaming originates from video games and it is therefore subconsciously corelated to it.  Whenever people who had no experience of playing modern multiplayer gaming come in contact with people who do, the entire gaming act reminds them of old-generation video games.  Therefore, as those video games could be considered fun, but generally pointless, so do people consider modern games in most cases.  It is considered that playing games turns people stupid as they spend time doing something mindless instead of sharpening their brains with more constructive things.  However, studies (read article in footnote 1) have proven that playing electronic games regularly increases sugar consumption by the brain and may increase its power by up to 7 times.

Secondly, it is believed that gaming is anti-social, where a youngster would be much better off doing other stuff with friends.  This might be the case for MOST of the games.  Of course spending countless of hours at home finishing one single player game after another is really anti-social and can negatively influence a person’s ability to behave correctly in social groups, especially when that person is a teenager that hasn’t yet fully developed a personality.  However since I’m differenciating between single-player and multiplayer games and I only stand in favour of the latter, I will completely disagree with that.  Gaming is very social when done from home but especially when done with friends in the so-fast spawning gaming centers that you might have noticed in the last few years.  This is because the ultimate goal of gaming, which is winning, can only be achieved if you are able to communicate with your team, understand each of your teammates’ strengths and weaknesses in the game, and be able to applause and forgive your teammates.  During the action-packed, adrenaline-full, emotional state of gaming where everyone is in, your teammates’ actions may cause your team to win or lose.  The communicational skills therefore earned from this, can, believe it or not, help later in life, in university and work team projects.

Third, and this is somehow of a joke to me, all the media bringing in random psychologists who tend to favour the opinion that games make people violent.  The truth of the matter is that a lot of social groups claim that the video game industry has become an easy target for the media to blame modern world problems on.  There are very few studies to back-up the theory that games make people violent, while studies that prove the opposite actually exist in numbers (article in footnote 2).  A US Secret Service study found that only 12% of those involved in school shootings were attracted to violent video games, while 24% read violent books and 27% were attracted to violent films (article in footnote 3).  In fact, if you read article in footnote 1 again, you will see that the study it refers to not only claims that electronic games make people smarter, but that they also help fight post-traumatic stress.  Shouldn’t that make people even less aggressive?  Nothing like a good game to take that social stress off.

Of course, not everything is milk and honey for gaming.  I can sit here and compare multiplayer electronic gaming to traditional games that made it into the category “sports”, like pool, cricket, volley, and if I dare even football.  Electronic gaming is steadily moving into that category, because the games themselves have enough of what they need to make it through.  Gaming needs talent but not as much as football.  Football needs brains but not as much as gaming.  Chess needs more brain that gaming but not the talent, the reflexes and communication skills of football and gaming.  So you see electronic gaming is quite equal to traditional gaming in general terms, only that for good or worse it makes use of electronic equipment.  However, because of its complexity, the brilliant graphics involved in most games and generally the intrinsic motivation playing games offers, electronic games tend to be addictive.  On top of that, unlike most traditional sports they do not tire the player in terms of his physical condition, which enables people to play for prolonged periods of time.  Even more, this allows people to become skilful enough and this way push others to spend similar amount of time in order to match them.  In short, electronic gaming tends to be abused and we all know that anything done in excess is bad.

To summarize everything, regardless of all of the benefits of gaming, it is an intrinsically motivating activity for which people get addicted and may cause problems at school/work/relationships.  Thus gaming is attacked by most individuals because they do not understand it, or the potential behind it.  There is a subconscious negativity against gaming because most people have not experienced enough modern day multiplayer gaming to understand it, and therefore relate it to pointless, mindless gaming as it was 20 years ago, which causes the negative effects said above.  The media use this negativity for making people happy during air-time by pointing the gun at gaming and blaming it for modern-day social problems that are mostly caused by other factors for example teams and political parities making people fanatics, coupled with the police being incompetent to handle situations.

1. http://www.naturalnews.com/028104_computer_games_PTSD.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversy
3. http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/preventingattacksreport.pdf