Gamer Divan: ¿Are videogames harmful?

Good evening, Steemians. Today I’m going to write to you about a subject that bugs my head from time to time: ¿Are videogames harmful for us? ¿Are the problems they cause stronger than the benefits they have? Or even worse: ¿Is actually worth to spend time playing them? Don´t get me wrong: I ADORE VIDEOGAMES. ¡They are my passion! But sometimes I think I should be doing something else with my life, something more valuable in the long run.

Reading online about the subject, I found out the opinions are strongly separated. There are the pro-gaming people, who states that playing videogames is actually a healthy way to spend free time. Gamers, according to them, develop a nice set of skills due to gaming: languages learning, hand-eye coordination, imagination development, and so on. On top of that, they state that videogames are a digital form of art, with visual appealing as valid as painting or sculpturing, and with stories as engaging and well narrated as books and theatre performances.

On the other hand, there are the anti-gaming people. They state that videogames are basically a waste of time and money: skills acquirable trough gaming can also be acquired doing other, more valuable, activities. Videogames are alienating, distracting gamers from their responsibilities and problems. Instead of solving them, gamers tend to isolate themselves from the real world, abstracting themselves while immersed in a surreal world provided by videogames. They also state that videogames have a catastrophic consequence in the long run: They tend to destroy the person’s ability to socialize with others in the real world, creating people who gets shy, introverted in a bad way, with low self-esteem.

Personally I think there is a third group, slightly harder to describe: It could be called “critical gamers”, gamers who enjoy videogames, but having a well based idea about the good and the bad parts of their hobby. They are able to recognize when gaming becomes a problem, and act accordingly. I’ve been through several phases in my “gamer life”, and feel that I can speak properly about them. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to see things in a retrospective way, identifying the positive and negative parts of each one. I actually have made some hiatus from my gaming, storing all my videogames (thinking about actually selling them) and being months straight without gaming. Some other times, gaming became a stronger part of my life, investing lots of time and money in videogames, and stopped doing some other things that are also important.

As everything in life, the main problem in this case is the right balance between lack and excess. ¿how much time is positive to spend playing videogames, and how much time is a problem? ¡how much time is a healthy behavior to play, using it as a stress reliever in these turbulent times, and how much is unhealthy to stay playing, instead of doing more productive stuff during such time? These are indeed dense questions, and for us gamers, sometimes is slightly harder to be honest with ourselves and analyze the situation in an objective way. Obviously, each person is a different world: what is good or bad for someone is not necessarily good or bad for someone else. The trick is to be wise enough to recognize the balance point. All gamers who are reading this KNOW that videogames can give us gorgeous moments, but can be harmful as hell if we don´t manage the time and money we invest on them. Is not surprising to read about broken families, ended relationships, lost careers and studies, bankruptcies and some other tragic consequences of videogames abuse.

It is almost impossible to measure accurately which are the right amounts of time for each person, for the simple reasons that is not viable to create a formula that can be applied on everyone: that’s exactly what happens whit things like needed hours of sleep or amounts of food required. Even alcohol ingestion, which could be compared with videogames due to its “ability” to become an addiction, from a medical point of view, is pretty different between people. ¿what can be concluded form such premise? We can conclude that the most important thing is self-awareness: we have to find for ourselves the exact point of time we play to get the benefits, without getting the bad stuff: distraction from real life issues, damage to personal relationships, health problems, and so on.

1) Videogames have positive and negative characteristics, which have a direct impact in gamer’s lives.

2) Rational use of videogames can serve as a healthy distraction, but abusing them have critical consequences.

3) It is vital to determine the correct balance between the time we spend playing, and the time we spend doing something else, like exercising, reading, going out, sharing time with the people we love.

4) It is important to have a rational, critical thinking about the gaming world, its good and bad things. It is not wise to defend them because we like them, or attacking them because we don’t.

¡thanks a lot for reading this, Steemians! ¡It would be sweet to see your comments!