Video Games Affect on School

Video gaming is a problem in today’s youth. Gaming, thought of as entertainment, is becoming known more as an addiction. Gamers are addicted to gaming like it is a drug, making these video games more of a danger.

The games are played during school, and after school ruining the student’s grades and lower their academic performance. Most of the youth today have a sort of gaming system at home, from a computer to a cell phone. Screen time can even lead to health problems like obesity. Not only do video games harm the student’s health, but their mental health is at risk the longer the game is played. Fixing the issue is a very important way to lessen the time on the screen.

Though no one can get rid of them completely there are ways to help prevent hours on end gaming. Video games are affecting the students every move, even if they are not played during school hours. 

Video games are affecting the grades students would get in school if video games were not played every day.

It affects the leaning because video games are a distraction, taking the focus off the teacher and turning it to a game hidden in the student’s lap. Weis, a clinical psychologist, performed a study on a group of boys seeing what the effects are of video games. Weis discluded girls from the study because researchers feared they would not play video games enough to produce meaningful results (Geranios 2010). Weis thought that if he involved girls in his study, he would not have accurate results.

This study showed what happened when boys between the ages of 6 – 9 were given a gaming system for the first time. It was a novelty that decreased the boys reading and writing scores. 

The difference between multi-player games and single-player games is children are at a greater possibility for lessoned literacy skills. Adolescents substitute time for reading with time for playing (Dewar 2018). Students, still going to school would get lower grades and not work as hard as they had before. Video gaming is addictive to teenagers nowadays.

Gaming is now considered as addictive as drugs (Willis 2011). 

Drugs send dopamine into the brain, dopamine is considered the reward system in the brain, and by achieving a goal in a video game the brain sends this out, as a reward for achieving the goal. By smoking, the brain is confused and will often send out this drug to tell the smoker that it wants more. It is why drugs are so addicting because the mind thinks it is doing good instead of damaging itself causing it to rewire itself. Most people see an addiction being to an overuse of substance, such as alcohol, but it is not just dopamine that can turn habits into an addiction.

Addiction is the constant need for the drug, the alcohol, or in this case the game. Today’s teens spend an hour or more playing video games and when their computer or gaming device is taken from those who relied on gaming they get upset. The first addiction center for video games was set up in the Netherlands forcing the U.S.A. to think maybe that they do have an issue. 

Video games are becoming a drug to teenagers with there unlimited access to computers and cell phones. Academic performance in teens has decreased since video games became mainstream among the younger generation.

90% of homes in the United States with children have a gaming system (Wright 37). 90% of children have been exposed to video games since they were little.

Those kids have known nothing but a life with gaming in it or at least the choice of gaming. Giving children the choice between gaming and studying for a test they would choose gaming with the thought of studying later. This happens even in young adults. As the hours of gaming rise SAT grades drop as does the pupils GPA (Wright 37).

The study was to see if video games would affect school life and as Wright said they were only going down while time playing went up. 

The more hours that were spent on gaming the less time there was for studying for tests that the student would have during the school day. This reduced their scores on those tests, making their grade lower and lower each test. Gaming does not just fill time that would have been spent, studying it also has users slowly losing the ability to focus on more tedious topics of longer periods of time. Students playing a game where they wander around an endless world, they have more focus in that game then they would a couple hours later when in a math class listening to the teacher talk about addition and subtraction. 

The gamers mind would wander from the topic to their game and their focus would be lost from the teacher. Losing focus also deprives the student of learning in that class.

The more the student finds their mind wandering from the topic the more the student thinks about the game. Screen time can lead to health problems and health problems affect school life. Health issues like insomnia, back pains, and obesity. Insomnia is the lack of sleep at night.

Being up all night long stuck on a level would help start a case of insomnia but staying up all night for weeks at a time would only make insomnia worst. Back pains would come from the hours spent hunched over a computer or a gaming device. It would also come from the rocking back and forth as a hard level was finally won, but as the level is lost, they lean back disappointed. Obesity kills 18% of the youth in the United States (Fox 2013). Gaming and eating stores energy in the body that makes the gamer gain weight if they don’t burn that energy away.

The longer the person stays inside playing the same game the more they raise the chances of having a cholesterol issue or diabetes.

Gaming not only affects one’s health of body, but it also affects the mind. By wasting the time away in front of a screen the player might stop talking to others.

That would make the person have few friends. Soon those few friends would fade away and the teen would only talk to his or her parents. At some point even, they would fade away from that person’s life and they would lose every kind of social interaction unless it was a multi-player game and they had a microphone they could speak into. Sometimes in very serious cases, the teen could even forget that their game is just a game.

They could forget and start confusing themselves about what is fiction and what is nonfiction. Due to the fact that addiction to video games may hamper their social life, the scope for them to mingle with other people and to experience the realities of the world becomes very limited (Staff 2018). 

Meaning the more time online the less time with actual people and having conversations. Violent games lead to aggressive behavior. Video games that are violent in nature lessen the minds ability to see violence as a bad behavior and turns the youth aggressive. Numerous video games which are supposedly meant especially for kids have violent content wherein aspects such as aggression and revenge are rewarded (Staff 2018).

Meaning content for kids isn’t being monitored leaving children able to play whatever it is they want to play even if it is violent and they were told not to play that. A solution to fixing this problem would be to limit the access that teens have to video games. Now taking their phones away isn’t the correct way of going about it. By taking the teens phones you are showing them that playing games on the phone is not a good thing, making the juvenile want to play games more. 

The best way to handle this problem is to make it where when a new phone is bought have the parents set it up and have an age restriction on the phones themselves.

No one can stop the youth from playing games on their phone but the most anyone can do is limit the access. Just as there is an airplane mode there could be an added school mode. When a student is in school the only messages that could be seen are from the parents of the child. Now knowing that anyone could turn on or off airplane mode with this school mode for the phones it would be linked to the parent’s phone, sending a message asking for permission to turn off school mode. If school mode permission is accepted, then the phone will send a message back to the student giving them permission to message their friends.

With the age restriction, that would be applied with the school mode. It would allow the phones user access to games that are school safe and in their age range.

Making the games not playable during school with the school mode. 

Some think that gaming helps the mind become faster at reacting to certain items like catching a ball that was thrown at their head or keeping the gamers hands still while working on an extremely delicate task such as surgery. People think that gaming is helping produce better health care professionals. Gaming can make reactions faster and making small cuts in surgery (15 Surprising Benefits 2018). Gaming can help the younger generation become better surgeons by making their hands less shaky.

Others think that because gaming increases the stability of some senses in certain ways that it does not change that the gamer themselves might have a mild addiction to gaming. Gaming is still an addiction, even if there are some small benefits. It is an addiction that should not be taken as lightly as it is. The gamers might be more delicate, but they have a higher chance of having a wandering mind, and not being able to focus on one topic at a time. That person has the higher chance of being more scattered brain.

Scattered brain meaning that the person can not focus on one object at a time and their mind will jump from topic to topic making them a person that is hard to understand what their thinking is.

Cite this page