Exploring the Potential of Video Games: Uncovering How They Can Make Us Better

Scientific studies indicate that games are an interesting and even useful hobby, which develops a person comprehensively. And quality devices, peripherals and accessories make the process even more enjoyable. Let’s talk more about the impact of games on people. The article was prepared by experienced writers of typemyessay.me, who have enough background information and knowledge to write on the specified topic.

Video games are a team effort

To win in online games, you need the skill of interaction with partners. It makes sense that the skills you learn improve your human interaction skills. You can practice great qualities in games that help people get through the difficulties of the present, like problem-solving and conflict resolution skills.

There are whole genres of games where success is determined by teamwork skills. And they also strengthen the alliance that has already emerged.

Games are a full part of our lives, even in terms of networking. It makes sense that spending time in them has increased in recent years.

Shooting games develop attention, not make kids violent

The Rochester student Sean Green, who studied psychology, refuted the well-known belief that shooters are bad for people. He gave friends a concentration test and found that games of the genre, on the contrary, train attention. “Shooters have been shown to be associated with improved attention to detail, accelerated brain information processing, and a number of other cognitive functions, including the development of speculative vision and imagination,” the paper claimed.

At first, Green and his research supervisor, Daphne Bavelier, thought the result was a mistake or a trivial coincidence. The woman took the test herself, and the result was normal. Only later it turned out that Greene’s friends had spent more than 10 hours a week on the shooter Team Fortress Classic.

Then they did another experiment. Green and Bavelier divided a group of gamers into two teams, the first of which spent one hour a day in the shooter, while the second played Tetris puzzle game. The results showed that participants in the first group had better attention span.

Video games have evolved into very complex phenomena that embody many of the principles that psychologists, neurophysiologists and educators believe are fundamental to the emergence of positive changes in human behavior, increased brain plasticity and the overall ability to learn in general. Games, by their very nature, are a proactive form of learning that is usually more effective than passive knowledge acquisition

Games are just a pleasant hobby

Entertainment is a way to relieve the psyche and distract from problems. Video games can be such a leisure activity.

There’s a certain degree of escapism in games that I think people need right now; the ability to just turn off all the chaos that surrounds us, step into the shoes of a character you care about, and go on an adventure with them.

Such a judgment is proved in a scientific article in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Researchers obtained data on gamers’ playing time from game manufacturers. More than three thousand users of the video games Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville took part in the study. They were surveyed about their attitude towards the game and their well-being. It turned out that the time spent in the games didn’t affect the mental state of the person. The biggest impact had the emotions that gamers get from the process.

The main observation: people who are dissatisfied with real life feel worse after playing video games.

Some more facts about the benefits of video games

The American scientists came to the conclusion that the computer games in the style of action improve the players’ ability to make fast and error-free decisions in real life. Such people analyze their surroundings, instantly catching the most important details. This ability is universal and does not depend on the situation in which a person finds himself.

Earlier studies showed that people who prefer active computer games, have a better response compared to those who are indifferent to the games. Now, however, it has been found that experienced gamers not only react quickly, but almost always correctly.

The behavior of gamers and those who are not fond of video games was compared in a series of experiments conducted by specialists at the University of Rochester in New York. In this case, the group of gamers included those who in the year before the study devoted at least five hours a week to games in the action style. Volunteers were shown arrays of dots and then asked to determine in what way these dots moved, how many of them moved in one direction or another.

As a result, it was found that 11 gamers completed this task faster than the 12 volunteers in the non-gamer group, without any compromise on correctness. According to Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, gamers are able to react more quickly to events in everyday life because they can quickly analyze the environment, pulling out the most important details.

Our brains are constantly making probabilistic inferences. For example, you are driving your car on a highway and find a motorcyclist swiftly pulling into it from the right. Your brain will calculate how likely it is that you are in the path of collision with him, and based on this will conclude whether you need to take the left or not. So the action games are improving all sorts of things.