Video games cause more harm than good

Video games are not a “good” way to earn money. They are a way to earn money the same as selling drugs is a way to earn money, or becoming a stripper is a way to earn money. Competitions have high entry fees and are oversaturated with savants. The average game player would probably make more money starting a garage band than playing video games. Unless you mean making money for the game makers, and the advertisers. There seems to be a market for people who want to sit on the couch and do nothing for 30-40 hours a week. Game makers are giving visual content to stories that would otherwise be non-existent. The problem is that many of those stories should have stayed that way. Sitting on your couch keeps you from doing other stuff like taking out the trash, paying attention to your actual surroundings, and getting good sleep. You can’t be attentive all the time, but it’s better to be attentive during the time you can be. Video games are great way to play with a computer and call it your friend. MMO’s restrict non-verbal communication which truly the core of all communication whether you believe it’s 93% of all communication or some other number. Gaming also restricts interactive physical contact. Sure if you are in the same room as second player, you can trade jabs and eat popcorn together, but when it comes to online you might as well be playing with NPC’s. You sit alone and talk to your computer telling it to pick up certain items, or perform certain tasks. The only difference between an NPC and a player controlled by another human being is variable response. Your actions and their actions are both limited by the game which acts as interference between both people. One person interacts with the game, the game interacts with the other player, the other player interacts back. Fighting genre games can prove that many players have no clue what the player next to them is doing, the buttons they press are in response to the characters on the screen not the thumb and finger movements of the player. Many players consider movement off the screen as a distraction and refuse to take their eyes away from the screen for even one moment. A girl could be standing there naked for all they know, they will not turn away and are completely shut off from their environment. What good are reflexes if they only occur in your thumbs? Reflexes come from doing task repetitively and continuously responding the same way to certain stimuli. Pavlov’s Dog is an example of this. Master rings a bell, it’s time to eat. Zombie pops out at you x,x,x,x,x, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. You’re physical reflexes are diminishing as you spend more and more time practicing being immobile. Better at multi-tasking? There’s a cliché that calls some people a “Jack of all trades…A master of none.” Too much “multi-tasking” cause cognitive difficulties when it comes to focusing on a single event. Many people call that ADD, ADHD, and Hyper-Activity. In real life, skills build upon skills and trust comes from experience. I’m just not going to trust a guy who is always talking about how he knows about everything. Being good at more than one thing is great. Claiming to be good at everything is questionable. That time spent multi-tasking could have been spent making you a guru. I hope by help you with stress and the ability to focus on a certain thing. You mean epileptic seizures. Video games also cause epileptic seizures, so we’ll see if that is considered a good. There is a great variety of video games but they all have one thing in common. They are just dying to tell you how well you are at performing the tasks you are required to do. Here’s an example of that praise in truth. http://youtu.be...; As I have never played portal 2, I decided it would be best for me to research it on youtube and I found the said link to be a true gem in proving addiction to the praise that happens unnaturally in video games. The walk through makes it look easy, but it seems to come with a lot of frustration. I can imagine a player Back tracking, pushing buttons that don’t do anything, performing certain tasks in confusing unknown sequences all for a prerecorded message of adulation. And the points don’t go anywhere. They just stay on the disk. The accomplishments are not tangible, and they vary from game to game. I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but this sense of accomplishment is the reason why Angry Birds is such a widespread game. Each level starts with birds grumbling which induces stress. To relieve that stress, you must destroy all of the pigs. The music is very encouraging, but skips beats. The music plays tricks on the mind that cause panic and poor performance in the game. If you don’t destroy the pigs, they laugh at you and you try agian to overcome the percieved ridicule. If you do destroy the pigs a very warming praise comes from the birds. You are presented with your star achievements and then you are returned to a new level with the sound of stressed out birds. Sports video games are great, but imperial sports are better. Video games have lag, the lag of today’s game is less than the lag of years gone by but it’s still there. Lag causes movements in interactive video games to be repeated over and over. You mustn’t repeat movement over and over for others to notice them in real life as you do for the machine. In outdoor sports there are many factors which are not present in video games, First and foremost is running. Using your body to press against gravity and move yourself great distances far out ways the benefit of running in place. Many times the movements in interactive video games are not the same as they are in real life. In Wii bowling for example, the balance and weight of a 12 pound ball cannot be matched. The movements with the controller in your hand are much different than they are with a real ball and Wii has a lot of forgiveness. And it probably should, the player isn’t fighting gravity, or friction, or variations in lane composition which all add to the experience of doing tasks in real life.