Video Games and Kids Essay Example

the entertainment qualifies one to be part of the games script. The changing trend in video games over the past few decades is that they currently require the participants’ full attention to the game. The difference with watching is that there is a deeper level of engagement both physically, emotionally and mentally. This brings varied impacts on the children both positive and negative effects. This paper elaborates on various impacts that video games have on kids, how the kids find access to these games and the benefits that they accrue from playing video games. It is the concern of the paper to discuss how parents control the time taken on video games by their kids.
Impacts of video games on kids

Exposure to video games help children interact with the computer technology and the online world. The modern day world is characterized by high technology making it a sophisticated world. This makes the kids familiar and comfortable to adapt to concepts of computing (Gee, 2003). Greater advantage goes to the girls who are not interested in high technology as their counter parts the boys. The video games too allow the parents and the kids to play together. This serves as a good bonding activity between the two. Some of the games that are counted as video games are both attractive to both the parents and the kids. Some kids turn out better players than their parents and this helps the parents to understand the children ability and skills.

Video games make learning fun. All kids like in video games is colors, the animations and the eye candy. Others can be attracted to the video games by interactivity and

challenge towards winning. According to psychology the best way to learn is when the learner finds fun in the process of learning. This makes video games natural teachers. The fun gives kids motivation to keep on practicing and that is the best way to learn skills (Squire, 2003). These games make kids creative regardless of gender or type of the video game played.

Self-confidence and self-esteem in kids is enhanced by playing video games. Levels of difficulty in various video games are adjustable. Beginners start by playing easy level games. Continuous practicing builds up the kid’s skills to higher levels to a time when they develop full confidence in handling more difficult challenges. They have an advantage in that they do not fear making mistakes out of the fact that the cost of failure is low. The kid continues to make more risks as he/she advances. The overall result is that the kid gains a sense of competency and mastery which is a human psychological need.

Children with the dyslexia condition benefit from playing video games. They are able to read faster and with better accuracy (Bioulac & Bouvard, 2008). Moreover, spatial and temporal attention tent to improve from the engagement on video games. Improvements in attentions lead to better reading abilities. Violent games have common emotional appeal to kids. This gives kids an opportunity to develop a freedom to make choices in the game universe. Rather than the view of aggression, video games gives kids a way out of stress and their frustrations. This is a positive aggression outlet such as football and other violent sports.

Using video games teach young children on how to follow instructions.

Basically, through the processes involved in playing video games, any single child gets used to the process of following instructions (Squire, 2003). Issues of problem solving and logic are enhanced by playing video games. Games such as the incredible machinery, angry birds or cut the rope, the result is that the child is able to generate possible ways that help them to solve puzzles creatively. This help the children even to solve other problems in short bursts. Getting used to such games keeps the child eager to develop creative ways of solving even bigger problems in life and understanding the basic logic.

Video games give children a hand-eye coordination as well as fine motor and spatial skills. Examples of video games that have shooting instances serve best for this example. The characters in this games run and shoot at the same time. In this case, only a real world tracker can keep track of the character’s position. Often it’s hard to tell where the character is heading or if the gunfire aims on an enemy or not. The player coordinates the factors around using brain interpretation followed by a reaction of body movement involving hands and figure tips. This process requires a great deal of the eye hand coordination as well as the visual spatial ability so as to achieve success.

There is seemingly a great possibility that people can learn or acquire iconic, spatial and visual attention skills from video games (Griffiths, 2002). This is both possible with the children as well as the adults in attaining surgical skills. The best pilots today are more of trained from video games. Video games enhance the skills of

planning, resource management and logistics. From the young age to old age, people learn to manage limited resources making best decisions on the best use of the resources. This is kept for all other fields of life. This skill has been honored in several video games such as SimCity, Age of Empires and the Railroad Tycoon. The SimCity game has influenced greatly the inspirations behind the careers of urban planning and architecture in American planning association. Such planning can trace the originations from young age where children start to planning and managing events.

Multitasking and simultaneous shifting of variables and managing multiple objectives is enhanced by video games. Here the player has to be flexible and quick to change. Exposure to video games gives kids a quick thinking ability to make fast analysis and decisions. Playing video games keeps the mind working since this games simulate a stressful event such as battles and action games (Mhurchu et.al, 2008). This acts as a training tool for real world situations. More often action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. This serves uniformly for both the grown-ups and children in making accurate decisions that are timely. Video games help children as well as the grown-ups keep strategy and anticipation. More importantly, it helps the children to develop situational awareness. The impact is realized from training on sudden situational changes in the game. This serves best in the training of soldiers in combat to being mindful of sudden situations.

Children playing video games benefit from developing a reading culture and math skill. This is enhanced by the ability to learn on how to follow instructions while following the

storylines. Math skills are important in winning games that involve qualitative and quantitative quantities (Griffiths, 2002). Perseverance in children as well can be advanced by playing video games. The perseverance that precedes winning is such an important lesson to the young gamers. Children learn how to recognize patterns since many of the video games have internal logic meaning that the player must figure out the patterns first. As argued by many researchers, playing video games is almost the same as handling a science problem. The researcher must first develop hypothesis and which is tested for its validity. In this case the video games serve best in teaching the young gamers inductive reasoning and hypothesis testing.

From psychological research, playing video games helps to improve memory. Examples of video games that involve shoot outs such as the call of duty keep the players in toes. They have to differentiate the type of information they have to store in their memory and that they have to discard. The difference between the two streams of information is dependent on the task at hand. Other researchers postulate that video gaming helps to improve concentration in children (Erim, Benjamin & Eileen, 2015). Conditions of attention-deficit disorder in children are improved by watching the “Dance Dance Revolution Empire”.

In children, playing video games helps improve the ability to rapidly and accurately recognize visual information. This makes kids quick visual learners since high frequencies on video gaming improves the registration of visual data. Kids who commonly play video games are less likely to be affected by perceptual interference (Greg, 2015). To a greater height this makes people able to learn for longer periods even

on distracting environments. Kids socialized with video games are often risk takers but make reasoned judgments. Most of the video games do not reward players who play safely and thus players especially the young gamer learns to take risks. They often know how to respond to the challenges and frustrations in the game. This is passed on to their lives even at old age as they live to play video games. Video gaming helps kids to learn team work and cooperation when the games are multiplayer games such as team fortress two. Such kind of a game encourage the kid to use their individual skills to contribute effectively to the team.

Kids Access to Video Games

Kids often find access to video games from many sources. Currently the modern day world is characterized by high technology. This means that may kids have had access to the computing technology. Computers serve as the main sources of video games to kids (Gee, 2003). This is facilitated by the computer applications that allow for the gaming interactions. Interfaces within the computers laptops and tables allow for this applications to run. Another major source of video games that is readily available to the children is the mobile phones. With the improvements on the android systems, many types of mobile phones are able to run applications that offer video games in the phones. TV’s are significantly good sources of video games that are accessible to many kids across the globe. They offer the play station games and many other types of video games. This sources are however easy to interact with at different levels. For the beginners, they take the easy level

games as they progress to mastery of the skills needed to play the more challenging video games.

Benefits That Kids Get from Playing Video Games

Repetition increases learning and video games are based on repetition. This means that if the reward from the video game that a child plays is morally upright, there is a likelihood that the child copies from rehearsing the teachings from the video game. They build their self-esteem and self-confidence in playing video games. As young beginners play the video games from the easy levels advancing to greater challenging games they gain mastery of the games gaining self-confidence (Buckley & Anderson, 2006). This is a psychological need for any other person as dictated by psychology. Skills learnt from playing the video games help children in their real lives. The violent and tricky games give kids a chance to build self-confidence. They often apply what they learn from the games into solving real life problems and encounters. Situations that may seem fearful to many adults who never played the video games turn out to be simple encounters with the children. They often find options to difficulties in life that they may come across within their life. The modern day world kids can solve unexpected circumstances that come along one’s life from applying their learnings from the video games.

Often children grow the ability to interact with other people especially their parents and other grown-ups. This is enhanced by the interactions between them and the older people during play and that enable them even learn from them. Children benefit by spending their time playing the video games other than involving themselves in other injurious games with

their colleagues. They also avoid the dangers that come with outdoor games as many of those playing video games spend much of their time indoors interacting with TV’s, computers and phones. Children have greatly benefitted by playing the video games as this is an opportunity for them to interact with the computing technology and other forms of technology such as the online platforms (Makiko et.al, 2015). Thais experience with technology not only gives them pleasure but also impacts some knowledge on how to use the new technologies and thus cope with the trends in the generation.

Parental Control of the Time Kids Takes on Video Games

It is important that a balance between every activity in life is maintained. For kids, this is not common and parents have to control the time spend by children playing video games. This might at times sound unfriendly or unacceptable by the children who often get addicted by the video games. This means that parents must remain strict to control their children. The idea behind this is to allocate time for other activities such as school work and social sessions. The parents therefore have several ways on how they control the time on video games.
Parents can limit the TV time by controlling the number of watching hours. This can be achieved by stocking the TV room with other sources of entertainment. This can include books, toys, kid’s magazines, puzzles and board games. This action encourages the kids to do other things than watching. Parents can choose to keep TVs out of the children’s bedrooms, keeping TV’s away during meal times. Parents should not to allow their children to watch TVs simultaneously

doing homework.

Parents can as well treat TV as a privilege that their children need to earn but not an entitlement. Advising children on the time to watch the TV can as well serve to control the watching time. This should be set after they attend all their duties and did their homework. Parents can set an example by limiting their own TV viewing. Checking TV listings and program reviews. This can be possible by finding TV channels that the family can watch together as a whole. These programs ought to be developmental programs and non-violent and that reinforce family values (Jordan, Hersey McDivitt & Heitzler, 2006). These programs can as well be those that foster learning either in hobbies or in education. In controlling time that kids take in watching, the parents can come up with a schedule of which TV programs to watch and when to watch it.

Parents can use the problem solve technique in controlling the time their kids take on video games. This calls for the two to work together with the child and find out a way they can shut the games in a much timelier fashion. An example is identifying some games that the child has to avoid at times. The parent can set a reward for turning off the game when the timer goes off. Alternatively, identify ways that the kid can cope with the unpleasant feeling that attack the child when the game is switched off and identify other fun activities for the child. However, some websites have timers that parents can use to set for the close of a game once it has been exhausted for a

day (Jordan et.al, 2006). For those kids who get access to the video games on online sources, their parents can control the internet so as to bar the children from accessing the games. This automatically diverts the attention of the kids to other things.

Though addictive and that could lead to violent behavior, video games have more advantages that disadvantages as viewed in the modern day world. For this reason, the parents should remain obligated to control the kind of video games their kids play. Additionally, parents should keep an eye on the amounts of time their children spend on video games. It is important that more that family values are considered rather than the gratification children receive from watching video games and which can at times lead to violence.

References

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