As I exited my Counter Strike game, I reflected back on the loss my team just experienced. I was really upset; and to make matters worse, my mom called me down to dinner and gave me the typical speech about why videogames were bad for me. She explained to me that I could use that “wasted” time to study, instead of rotting away on my computer. Classic!

In today’s world, one of the biggest relationship problems between younger and older generations is video games. The main cause of this riff is the fact that older generations don’t understand why kids play videogames or how they work, especially since they didn’t have these kind of things when they were younger. There’s a large group of elders that believe that videogames are a waste of time and that people could be using this time to study or work. They also believe that gaming makes people violent and do illegal things that might happen inside video games. While some of these points may be true, there is a lot more to gaming than most of the older generations think.

Since video games have been one of the major problems and topics for discussion, professionals have started conducting researches to see whether video games were good for people. Surprisingly, it was proven that video games can improve parts of the brain. This point was found by german researchers who asked adults about the age of twenty-five to play the game Super Mario 64 about 30 minutes a day for two months. The researchers compared the test-subjects to people who did not play video games to come to this astonishing conclusion. On another note, video games specifically improve and support the older generation’s cognitive endurance. A study of 650+ people, 50 years and older, showed that playing a certain video game for 10 hours plus slowed the decrease in cognitive skills. Some people revealed up to seven years of cognitive function. Of all of the research that has been done on video games, these are just two examples to support the value of video games. Although video games are beneficial in some ways, they also have a negative side which is why a common realm has to be made.

Video games are new to society and like everything else, the ability to adapt to this change can be difficult. Gaming has a negative light cast on it but there are many benefits to playing them responsibly. For people to start understanding more about video games, the older generation and the younger ones have to come to a common ground. While the younger generation should start playing games more responsibly, the older generation should start looking at the benefits and try to start getting into the new idea of gaming.

<Timothy Jun La Canada HS 8th Grade>