You come out of your room for dinner after spending a few hours playing games with your friends, you sit down at the dinner table and your mom starts to lecture you about how bad video games are for  you and your health. You suddenly start to think about it, what are the positives and negatives for video games? After dinner you go back to your room and search up, “Impact of video games.” As you read the article, you realize that there is multiple benefits of playing online video games, from motor skills, cognitive skills, social skills, and many more, however, you noticed that some of the video game benefits have one thing in common, social skills. Video games are a great way to improve your social skills, a child growing up playing video games could grow into a built-in leader.

Unlike what most parents think, researchers have found that online video games can lead to beneficial effects such as; “manual dexterity, brain’s gray matter, social skills, and many more.” Which is important to know because, “gamers make up more than a third of the world’s population, in  2022 there is approximately 2.96 billion people around the world that plays games”  (Lebow 2022) That’s why parents, we should never judge a book by its cover, and at least know the facts before assuming things. Although video games can be beneficial, gamers and/or parents, one should be aware of their health or their child’s health.

I interviewed two of my friends that played video games for several years. I asked them both the same questions and they’re both the same age. Friend A, played video games for 7 years, and when I asked him how his social skills were before playing video games versus how he currently is, he stated. “When I was a kid, I was extremely shy, I would have social anxiety when talking to anyone besides the people I know. Compared to now, I am less shy and now I’m more confident when talking to people that I don’t know.” I then asked him, “Do you think this is due to aging or do you think video games have an impact on this?” Friend A responded with, ” I think video games has helped me develop social skills throughout the years I have been playing, not too sure if aging had anything to do with my social skills. This is because online video games require team work and communication, communication is key in completing/winning video games which is why I think video games helped develop my social skills, I also felt like video games helped me get out of my comfort zone to speak a lot more.” In essence, my friend do believes that video games develop one’s social skills, he believes that online video games helped him with his social anxiety, pushing him out of his comfort zone to communicate with people he doesn’t know, making it feel more natural for him.

Friend B has played video games for nearly 10 years. I asked him, ” How are your social skills now compared to your social skills when you were a kid?” Friend B, responded with, “It’s hard to remember how I was since it’s been 10 years, but I would say that my social skills are definitely better now, it might not be because of video games though.” I then responded with, “that brings us to the next question, “do you think this is because of aging, or do you think this is because of video games?” Friend B replied with, ” I would say both helped for sure. I felt like online video games developed my leadership skills and my response time. I felt like online video games helped me in maturing as well. When playing online video games you can meet a whole diverse of people, some of them are chill people that play video games for fun, the other side is a bunch of competitive people that will curse you out when you make a mistake and say crazy things, which makes me say that video games made me tolerable.” Friend B explains that online video games has helped developed his social skills, he believes that it developed his leadership skills and made him more mature and tolerable.

According to the article, “Video games may improve children’s intellectual and social skills, study finds” written by Doug Bolton,  researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman  School of Public Health in New York, conducted an experiment with thousands of children around the globe. They found out that, “the team found that high video game usage was associated with a 1.75 times increase in the odds of high intellectual functioning.” They also found, “Children who played a lot of video games were also found to be 1.88 times more likely to have “high overall school competence” (Bolton 2016).  This quote states that video games improve your intellectual functioning as well as your school competence by more than 1.5x for both.

In the article, “Is time spent playing video games associated with mental health, cognitive and social skills in young children? ” Published by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016, they have shown a table that tells the audience that kids have a higher score  in intellectual functioning  as well as in school competence (Table 2). Unadjusted means that factors like their gender and psychological distress aren’t account for, while adjusted means all the factors are. In the graph we can see that children playing games for more than 5 hours have greater numbers in both unadjusted and adjusted, which correlates to my main topic of video games being beneficial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This table comes from a survey, “SCHME (the School Children Mental Health in Europe)”, it is a survey of European children from ages 6-11 in 2010. Data was collected in Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey for this study. They surveyed about 45-50 schools across the country, randomly picked schools, they also randomly picked approximately 48 children from each school. This data table consists of approximately 3000 young children across European countries, which backs up the fact that, “high video game usage was associated with higher intellectual functioning, increased academic achievement, and a lower prevalence of mental health difficulties” (Springer 2016)

The article also talks about a Japanese study of kindergarten children, in which they discovered that children who played video games had more friends and were more inclined to socialize. About 426 children were asked to complete a self questionnaire to determine this information. One interesting thing about this Japanese study is that on the text it states, “It is noteworthy that one of the boys with the lowest social counts was reported to play the TV game nearly everyday for two hours.” (Shimai and Masuda 1990). I found this quote to be very interesting because it correlates to the evidence about kids with 5+ hours of gaming usage having a higher score in intellectual functioning and in school competence more than the kids that have 1-5 hours of gaming usage. This is because this quote further proves that online video games can be beneficial to one’s self.

Ultimately, with all this information I have gathered, we can conclude that video games are beneficial to one’s self, being able to develop one’s social skills from an early age and making it easier for them to talk to people and get friends. Parents and/or gamers be sure to monitor your own or your child’s health when playing games, for too much of anything is bad for you.

 

References:

Lebow, Sara. “Gaming’s Growing Population.” Insider Intelligence, Insider Intelligence, 19 Oct. 2021,

https://www.emarketer.com/content/gamers-make-up-more-than-one-third-of-world-population.

Kovess-Masfety, Viviane, et al. “Is Time Spent Playing Video Games Associated with Mental Health, Cognitive and Social Skills in Young Children?” Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, vol. 51, no. 3, Mar. 2016, pp. 349–57.

Bolton, Doug. “Video Games May Actually Have Positive Effects on Young Children, Study Finds.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 9 Mar. 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/games/video-games-children-learning-intelligence-social-skills-study-a6920961.html.

Shimai S, Masuda K, Kishimoto Y (1990) Influences of TV games on physical and psychological development of Japanese kindergarten children. Percept Mot Skills 70(3 Pt 1):771–776