Can video games be considered healthy?

My topic for the next paper will be video games and how they are positively or negatively affecting the gaming demographic throughout the world. My first article “Social And Emotional Benefits Of Video Games: Metacognition and Relationships,” by Jordan Shiparo, looks at the evolution of video games and the culture/demographic that surrounds them and how they are both helping children develop stronger meta-cognitive skills. The industry began with the paddle and joystick games such as PacMan and Asteroids on the Atari system and developed into the first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield on the Xbox and PS3 that we play today. In these games, gamers must consistently be able to execute actions or commands in order to advance ranking or to survive. In order to reduce the time in between these actions, they become reflexes and gamers begin to show “faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial resolution in visual processing, and enhanced mental rotation abilities” (Shapiro). The article then goes on to discuss how video games promote an incremental theory of intelligence or growth mindset as gamers are forced to adapt in order to solve puzzles and situations they are placed into.

My second article analyzes many of the same positive effects of playing video games and it also looks into some of the negative sides effects that the first article either briefly mentions or fails to mention. However, in the process of discussing both sides of these side effects, the author tends to rely on anecdotal pieces of evidence as he describes the gamers as “a bunch of sweaty man-children clutching liter bottles of Mountain Dew” before discussing that video games are not as unhealthy as we may have previously thought (Marks). Both articles do reach similar conclusions that video games are surprisingly healthy for us, especially when compared to television, but the first article definitely maintains a higher logical value than the second.

First Article: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/05/social-and-emotional-benefits-of-video-games-metacognition-and-relationships/

Second Article: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/are-video-games-good-or-bad-for-us/#axzz3HLCcFynS