Violent video games, good or bad, the fact of the matter is that the majority of people are playing them. According to the article, “Brain Changing Games” by Lydia Denworth , more than ninety percent of youth is playing them. But it’s not all child’s-play, also according to Denworth, the average gamer age these days is 33. With so many people playing these games that promote otherwise deviant or even taboo sociological behaviors in our modern society, it is important to try to find out what real effects the games are having on our brains. Are they making us a more violent and desensitized population, or are the games sharpening our important everyday senses? (or both?)
The article, “Brain Changing Games” by Lydia Denworth mainly focuses on the ways that playing violent games helps improve our overall brain power. First, Denworth delves into how it was not that long ago when believing that playing violent games was a recipe for turning your brain into idiot stew was the popular way of thinking. After many years of research on this stereotype though, Denworth claims that this is not at all the case.
In fact, Denworth says that all of the research points to how playing violent games can help to improve skills that can be applied all of the time in our daily lives and not just in the video games.”… a decade of research has shown that if I spent a few more hours playing Call of Duty, I could improve more than my aim and the life expectancy of my avatar. Aspects of my vision, attention, spatial reasoning and decision making would all change for the better.” says Lydia Denworth in, “Brain Changing Games.”
Next, Denworth explains that research done by neuro-scientist, Daphne Bavelier, concludes that these games in particular are already achieving the whole point of our education system, which is teaching somebody how to learn. Even the great Einstein said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” The article also talks about how her research has shown that videogames can help people with visual disorders.
Then, The article goes into how it is the most violent games that have the strongest positive influence on our brains, but there is also a stronger negative influence when it comes to violent behavior. Luckily though, it is currently believed that the affect that the violence has on our behavior is only temporary and brief, whereas the positive neurological effects are long lasting. The next step then, or the step currently in progress, is to figure out how to not only make video games that can improve our brains in all the ways that the extremely violent games do right now without all of the weapons and violence, but to do this and still have a game that people are going to want to buy and play.
Finally, The article covers a few more aspects of where videogames are actively improving our brains such as improving the speed of processing visual information and making a decision. Then, it briefly describes the commonly looked over or ignored presence of game addiction but this is not overwhelmingly relevant.
I found this article to be pretty informational, although it was not a first-hand study. It was merely introducing other studies that were related to the topic. The studies provided though were reliable and were conducted by credible neuro-scientists with all the aspects of a well performed experiment. The outcomes of all the experiments in this article all line up with what I had already believed myself, and that’s that violent games don’t produce violent people, violent people produce and play violent video games. I was surprised however to see just how much playing violent games can help me in the real world.
When it comes to whether or not the game companies can produce a nonviolent game that still contains all of the brain training properties that will still sell, I don’t think it is going to happen. I believe that these games can absolutely be produced, but it probably won’t sell very well. Before all of these new studies, people weren’t paying for games like Call of Duty in order to improve their spatial awareness, they were paying for the violent nature of the game. they were paying to kill people in a virtual world and I would bet that this is still the case today. I believe that this article did not do a very good job of saying how game companies were planning on accomplishing this task.
People are, and have always been a violent breed. In macro terms, nothing has really changed. The introduction of videogames has not made our society any more violent then we were in the times of gladiators and coliseums. I strongly believe that someone who is not already a violent person will play Grand Theft Auto and suddenly become violent and try to imitate what they saw on the screen by running over unsuspecting pedestrians and motorcyclists. When confronted with the ignorant idea that games are stemming violence in society, I simply refer to the common phrases, “do guns kill people or do people kill people?” “do spoons make people fat? ”
All in all, this was a good and insightful article, but it could have done a lot more in introducing solutions as to how to make a successful game without incorporating the violence that everyone is currently dishing out the big bucks for. Also the article would have been more credible if it offered a first-hand experiment as opposed to just offering other experiments alongside matters of opinion.
link to Lydia Denworths article:
http://lydiadenworth.com/2013/01/brain-changing-games/
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