Negative Effects Of Video Games Essay

Nowadays, many children are addicted to video games that they play these games daily. According the research made by NPD GROUP, there was an increase by 9% of children aging between 2 and 17 that play video games compared to 2009. There was also an increase by 17% in the number of children aging between 2 and 5 that play video games compared to 2009. These percentage shows that video games are attracting many kids every day. Video game is an electronic game where the player controls a character, and interact with it while being displayed on the screen. The first video game advertised was Pong. It was announced in 1972. It was similar to a table tennis game, where the player could hit the ball with a racket. After this, there was an evolution
However, violent video games affect children negatively, as they increase their aggressive behaviours. This will lead to increasing violence in their lives. More than 98% of paediatrician think that exposure to violent video games for long times would affect the children’s behaviours negatively (Gentile, Oberg, Sherwood, Story, Walsh, &Hogan, 2004). Another bad effect of violent video games is aggressive thoughts. Many children may have aggressive thoughts because of playing violent video games like what happened in 1999 at a Columbine High School. Two of the students killed twelve student and a teacher after playing violent video game called Doom, (Brooke, 1999). They mentioned the video game in a video they made before the crime. This shows the negative effect of violent video games on children’s thoughts. Humans are more likely to imitate each other since their birth. Mirror neurons were lately discovered in humans, and they represent a mechanism in humans’ brains that facilitates imitating each other (Caggino, Fogassi, Rizzolatti, Their, & Casile, 2009). Although imitation has some benefits as learning some positive behaviours, it also has bad effects as learning aggressive thoughts and behaviours. Children are more likely to imitate aggressive behaviours they see, just like the aggressive behaviours they see in a violent video game
However, violent video games affect the children’s academic performance in a negative way, and would cause poor results. According to Anderson, Gentile, and Buckley, (2007), spending many hours playing violent and non-violent video games would cause poor school performance for children. The explanation of the poor performance is that the time children spend to play video games displaces the time they should spend to studying and read. As a result, this would cause poor academic performance and bad results. For example, a group of 1491 of youth ageing between 10 and 19 was studied. The results showed that 30% of gamers spend most of their time playing video games than reading or doing their homework (Cummings & Vander water, 2007). At this point, the academic performance of children would not be improved and they would not have good results at