Video Games

I firmly believe that video games have many good benefits to them. But like with any good thing it can be twisted into being something evil.

Too much use of video games is evil. The use of a video game promotes reaction speed. It helps problem solving skills. It helps with three dimensional spacial imagination. It helps with creativity. It help promote literacy. It helps people learn and then deliver stories. It helps instill facts and vocabulary into the mind. But how much video game time is need to promote reaction speed up to a curve where the benefit is no longer proportional to the time spent? That is the difficult thing to measure.

To understand my argument a bit better all of these above skills are based on a learning curve. Learning curves have humbs and dips. Whenever one wants to acquire a new skill so much time needs to be spent to reach the next level of whatever it is they are working on. A mathematical representation could be as such. If we were to define the abilities of an individual on a gradient with the following levels: beginner, novice, intermediate, trained, expert, and master then a beginner would be anyone that knows anything about their skill. I know that tables usually have 4 legs. I'm a beginner at table making. Let's say that the learning curve for me for the skill of table making requires me to build 5 tables before I am a novice. 15 tables before I am an intermediate. 25 tables before I am trained. 50 tables before I am an expert. And finally 100 tables of various shapes and sizes to become a master. So much time must obviously be spent to build these tables. Is that time worth the status that I am collecting? Just like any other skill that we can learn in real life the skills presented above by video games are based on a learning curve. I represent the problem of time. How much time is required to advance these skills to the next level so that the benefit of the skill outweighs the benefit of having free time? I submit that we learn these skills much more quickly than we think and that the majority of time spent on video games becomes non-beneficial at an exponential rate.

Looking more into my argument about stories and facts. Educational software is becoming one of the leading ways in which people learn and grow academically these days. Last semester I had a class in which I used a video game mapping tool to learn every spatially grand county in the world. That was an amazing use of my time. I played a game last year called Assassin's Creed that takes place in Florence and then its sequel taking place in Rome. I played both games entirely in Italian. This exercised my brain to remember the Italian that I had. I could then use my comprehension skills face to face and be able to continually speak what Italian I still know. This was my justification for playing the game. I of course enjoyed the other aspects of the game, the ones that are arguably not worth my time but that fact alone I felt was enough of a benefit to play the games.

I could go on. None of my inferences have been brought about by research but only by personal discovery and  self discourse but for these simple arguments I believe that video games have many good benefits.