Jonathan Lopez
English 11000
Justin Falk-Gee
11/12/19
Why are video games still getting negative backlashes?
By: Jonathan Lopez
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Games today have a bigger impact on society today than any other time. With rising fame and power of video games today, its social power can sway millions of people around the world and this power can often cause people to fear it for the wrong reasons. In addition to this, people try to capitalize on these fears for a variety of reasons but mainly for personal agendas. This constant stirring of public fear often convinces people to listen to those who mention these fears, mainly being politicians. But couldn’t be further from the truth as video games often do the opposite and help society in many ways.
In today’s society, information has never been more available to the average American than ever before with technology making leaps and bounds with fast hardware and more efficient software. However, this amazing aspect of life is being filtered to make you hear certain information that people want to hear. This is perfectly shown with the current president Donald Trump, stating the following about video games:
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This claim has been very controversial causing the United States to split further apart, especially with the rise of mass shootings happening. This is further reinforced with one shooter mentioning the popular video series Call of Duty in the shooter’s manifesto. However, this alone is not enough to solely blame video games because it seems simple and concrete. This can be very risky in the long term as it convinces people to falsely put games in a false light and taking valuable resources to find the real cause of shooting which is exponentially more complex than just games. Games have done more good than bad in society as time goes on with it helping medically, culturally, or economically. This isn’t an empty claim as many studies and examples are out there to support this claim with games being used to help in the treatment of certain disorders. An example of this is dyslexia where there is a constant information flow requiring the player to focus and perhaps make new friendships along the way if the game is also connected to the internet which also disproves the idea of players often being socially isolated. Popular website mentalfloss.com provides a shortlist of other benefits for those who play video games and this ties into the cultural aspect of how video games help as often playing games can sharpen your leadership skills with games rewarding such behavior, thus leading players to continue doing such. If the present doesn’t sound that interesting to you then perhaps the past can like how the mentioned website, mentalfloss.com state since games can present historical events or periods of time wherein way to attract even the most bored kid in any history class.
But it doesn’t stop there as playing games for a living can being in serious amount of cash from the 2 main sources: streaming and tournaments. Many people are making millions from playing games in a competitive way or entertaining way often doing both making tens of thousands of dollars in a tournament and then bringing in a stream of money by streaming to fans. In addition, this isn’t exclusive to one genre either with many tournaments for fighting genres with a popular one called EVO, one for the game First-person shooter series, Call of Duty called the Call of Duty League, and one for Role-playing games with a popular tournament being called the League of Legends Championship Series and all of these can offer prize money to an individual or team ranging from a couple thousand to tens of millions of dollars. But if you just want to have fun playing video games and not have to deal with all the tournament pressure, then you could stream yourself(Yes you!) right now on many platforms with the most popular platform being called Twitch. Streaming won’t give you much money in one time but instead, give you money over time from multiple sources. But back to the main idea of video game’s negative outlook by society, it is falsely deserved with its true benefits being twisted and hidden by those in power because they felt threatened by recent events and looked for a scapegoat to use. But you can change that by joining the conversation and expressing your opinion, armed with this knowledge to make sure you tell others the truth and change this injustice.
Citations:
Image #1:
https://medium.com/@hit86game1/how-do-video-games-affect-your-brain-a4c72ee5d858
Image #2:
https://me.me/i/tweet-donald-j-trump-realdonald-trump-video-game-violence-8995731
