brain dump: video games

    In English class, we're currently taking a unit on argumentation (my favorite :3) and we had an assignment on that today. Specifically that assignment was on an article titled "Video Games: Bad for the Brain?" And no other piece of writing, in my personal opinion, has come so close yet so far to missing the point of what the real issue is regarding video games and younger people like kids and teenagers.

The article discusses multiple studies talking about how young people playing video games has a correlation with how badly or well they do in school. This is done by discussing studies from both sides. Studies where students who play lots of video games do worse, and studies that show students who play video games have increased. 

While this, and the article itself mentioning that correlation doesn't equal causation when discussing the former of the mentioned sides, this is an extremely binary way of looking at how video games affect students and doesn't take into account what video games actually are. 

Video games are nothing but entertainment.

    While yes, they can distract students from their work and that can result in worse grades and overall worse academic performance, so can TV shows, movies, et cetera! Video games are always written about and discussed like the second coming of Academic Satan (who I'm best friends with, by the way) but that's one of the most disingenuous ways of looking at things. Video games aren't any different from other medium, specifically in the way that it affects you psychologically. [citation needed]

 

 

What the article fails to do, even in its attempts to compensate, is to recognize that video games don't "impede academic performance" OR enhance it. It is entertainment. It has the capability to distract and the capability to teach the viewer something new. Video games don't influence people more than books do, and we read those all the time.

 

Alright, that's all I have to say, thanks for reading! <3