Gaming provides several surprising benefits including improving cognitive abilities and mental health. Here’s why gaming may not be as bad as it is made out to be. Discover the positive effects of playing video games.
Life, in many ways, is just one big game full of challenges and pressures, and people need to find some relief from stress every now and then.
While things like exercise, playing board/card games and listening to music are effective stress-busters, playing games can also serve as a huge stress-buster, and surprisingly it also has other benefits.
There are many who see video games as a form of entertainment, something to have fun with. The fact is that, leaving aside all those cool graphics, awesome music, and the intriguing plots, these games can improve ypur mind and offer educational opportunities as well.
Here are some of the learning opportunities that games can present.
- Develops Strategic Thinking: Yes, Video games do that! Rare is the video game that doesn’t require its player to make a decision two or three steps ahead of a current situation. With constant play, players quickly learn the advantage of strategic thinking and they start to apply it to actual world opportunities.
- Video games improves your problem solving. Although the same could be said about any game, video games have proven in study after study to improve problem-solving skills. This is because most (if not all) games are centered around a problem and then challenge the player to solve it. In just one game, a player may solve anywhere from three to a hundred or more different problems.
- Improves decision-making. One quality of video games that lends to quick decision making is its impromptu situations. The element of surprise is always around the corner and it’s what makes games exciting to play. To win however, players must be able to make smart decisions within a very short amount of time.
- It improves memorization. Video have a strong influence on memorization. The terrain portrayed inside some of these games is huge, yet accessing the maps can be cumbersome and disruptive to the game. To compensate, gamers will not only memorize a large portion of the terrain, they’ll remember the tasks required to get to specific areas.
- Video games feed the imagination. There are many who feel that television, videos, and gaming away from the imagination, because they supply the mind with all the things instead of encouraging the mind to come up with something new. These same people feel that a stack of blocks is sufficient to grow a child’s imagination. Well, on the contrary, the imagery in video games fuels the imagination and gives it a spring board to form new possibilities that might not have occurred otherwise. So we choose to disagree here.
- Video games encourage exploration. In role-playing games, players must venture off the beaten path and explore the unknown. They have to open doors without knowing what’s behind them. They have to enter areas of the game without knowing the consequence. And they have to interact with characters that they’ve never met before. Inside these particular kinds of games, the opportunity to gather up the courage to explorer unknown territory isn’t just available, it’s required.
- Video games teach consequence. All computer and video games operate off of an ‘action – reaction’ principle. Do something, and the game will react. This is a great opportunity to learn about consequence – whether this opportunity is experienced from a gamer’s point of view or a programmer’s point of view.
- Improves your hand and eye coordination. If you find this hard to believe, pick up a game controller and try to maneuver around the game. Manipulating a game controller demands the same skills that it takes to maneuver a mouse around a computer screen.
- Video games teach patience, dedication, and endurance. No great game can be conquered in a day. In fact, some of the best and most popular games take weeks or months to finish.
So, if you’re worried that your teenage child spends a lot of time playing games, it may not be bad after all. Instead, it might be making their minds sharper.
Here are some research backed statistics.
In a 2014 study at University College in London, researchers surveyed 491 subjects and found a correlation between the total number of hours spent playing games (primarily first person shooters and action games) per week, and overall recovery from work-related stress that day.
Among 251 men surveyed in a University College London
study, 29 percent used video games to relieve stress. Only 27 percent chose having sex or watching porn to help them cope.Researchers at the National Institute on Aging were impressed by studies showing the positive effects of video games on cognitive functioning, that they launched a $1.2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) project to use a Nintendo Wii to try and help improve the daily cognitive functioning of senior citizens.
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