Who Says Video Games are a Bad Thing?

For the article by Steven Johnson, I have to disagree with him on the influence of video games on society. While it is a bad thing for a child or anyone else to sit and play video games all day, video games can promote some very impressive abilities amongst gamers. Such abilities can even be greatly beneficial for people in different career paths. Video games can even promote friendships with people from different places. Games nowadays are capable of allowing people to interact with other people either down the street or even on the other side of the world.

According to Steven Johnson, neither video game or books are really a bad thing. Johnson considers that if video games had came before books, then books would be considered controversial. Johnson believes that books have their pros and cons as much, if not more than video games since they both are capable of helping or hurting those that enjoy them. Johnson even mentions that for good things, books can provide knowledge while video games can promote various things with a person's hands. For bad things, Johnson mentions that books can produce apathetic behavior while video games can produce laziness in children.

Games today are actually scientifically proven to be very beneficial for gamers to play that allow them to be able to improve themselves when they are trying to go into a career field that they choose to go into. One kind of career that has been considered to benefit from all kinds of games is being a surgeon due to hand-eye coordination, but this isn't the limit for jobs that people can benefit from when playing games. Because games can be used as a tool for developing a person's abilities, they are often used for many things, such as in driving or for training a person to be able to properly be able to fly planes. Game systems like the Wii or the new xbox360 kinect are also useful, in that for various games, such as an actual surgery game that is available for the Wii, the controller used requires that the gamer also must be precise since it uses an infrared laser that is pointed at the screen, while the kinect has players being more active while playing because of their actual body movement being used or when only their body is being used and they must be able to judge the position of things like an in game soccer ball and be able to react to it. Also for the games that use just a person's body, real sports can benefit since games are getting up and moving around, thereby getting actual exercise.

When Steven Johnson had mentioned that games and books are both thought to cause people to become more apathetic, I strongly and completely disagree on the video game part and agree on books being somewhat bad for developing relationships. Video games are quite capable of helping relationships, since most of them are able to allow multiple people to play the same game as either teammates or in friendly competitions in multiple ways. At first, on systems like the Atari and the original Nintendo, people were only able to play games for two players, and often the two were already friends. When the first Playstation and the Nintendo64 had came out, these allowed more than two people to play and allowed a gamers' friend to invite people over to play. Now thanks to the internet and the improvements to game systems, people are capable of playing with more than just friends. When the xbox360 had came out, it was the first system that allowed people to be able to play with people who had their systems connected to the internet, meaning that people in a small town could play with someone down the street, in another state, or even with a follow gamer on the other side of the Earth. Books on the other hand are read individually, unless they are read to someone who can't read like those with dyslexia or preschoolers.

When Johnson had mentioned that games only produce better hand-eye coordination that’s not true. Games nowadays have started to promote problem solving skills with various puzzle games that are released, to games that have gamers manage things like a small farm to a vast complex city that they can build from the ground up with whatever they want in it. There are even systems out now that require gamers for certain games to have to get up and actually move around in order for them to actually be able to play. The first such system to be produced is the Wii, which uses a combination of a motion sensor and a controller that have the player move in various ways like, for example, paddling a canoe in a game for swinging the controller like swinging a flag. One such game was the wildly popular Wii fit, which enabled people to improve their balance, lose weight, and perform aerobics the games that have you, the gamer manage something will have you do different things to keep things running smoothly, like listening to the people in a virtual cities suggestions and complaints in order to insure that the city is going smoothly and not about to collapse on you. For the new Xbox 360 kinect, the games that go with it require only one controller to use it, you. While the idea is new, the xbox360's controller less idea allows the gamer to be able to move themselves and do various things, playing soccer or interacting with a pet.

Video games will long be part of our culture. Even children are helped while playing video games, by learning skills like math and reading using a combination of playability and the child’s favorite TV shows. Our government believes that if games can’t be banned, then they should be a controlled substance like alcohol or tobacco. Recently, I had found out that congress has establish in California that store that sell video games must now have the person wanting a game produce an ID that shows they are old enough for the game they want to get. Despite their attempts, each day thousands of gamers voice their opposition to these attempts while their numbers also continue to grow. As a fellow gamer and in opposition to people like Steven Johnson on games, I say will forever be a part of the world. “Who says video games are a bad thing?”