Press Play: Exploring the Role of Video Games in Teenage Life
Over the last couple of decades, video games have exerted a dominant presence on the horizon of teenage life, such that they have transformed from mere instruments of entertainment into channels that facilitate social interaction and personal development.
To begin with, video games offer immersive experiences and are most often predicated on great storytelling. For example, the Emmy-award-winning TV limited series The Last of Us is based on a universally acclaimed action-adventure videogame series of the same name. Video games then instead of being spectacles of senseless enjoyment allow players to experience diverse contexts and settings, in addition to exposing them to a wide range of perspectives and narratives. In fact, some might even argue that video games are educational experiences much in the same way that magazines or books are.
Owing to this, more and more young people are playing video games, and over time the skewed gender dynamics of video game players have improved too, such that young girls have slowly become as enthusiastic about video games as young boys. As teenagers do not limit themselves to specific genres of video games, but instead play a wide range of genres, it allows teenagers to imbibe different ways of thinking about the world. Gaming therefore has become a major social experience for teens, and contributes to community formation, allowing peers across the world to come closer to each other and form meaningful social bonds. Further, gaming contributes to an enrichment of the cognitive skills of teenagers, in addition to honing their reflexes and decision-making skills, by requiring them to improve their hand-eye coordination and make split-second decisions.
There are legitimate concerns about video games, with the most important of them being how video games are often violent and gory, and therefore desensitize teenagers to violence. Arguments from this perspective also claim that because video games directly implicate teenagers as players in their violent worlds and require them to make violent decisions, they are more harmful than violent TV shows and movies. Additionally, teenagers come in contact with strangers over the internet, and therefore their sense of safety and well-being is threatened in insidious ways.
Therefore, a nuanced understanding of video games helps us foreground that while it is easy to villainize video games in themselves, demonization is not very helpful. Instead, it is important for us to equip teenagers with critical thinking skills to allow them to nurture healthy gaming practices.
Sources
https://www.brightpathbh.com/effects-of-video-games-on-teen-mental-health/
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2008/09/16/teens-video-games-and-civics/
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