Video games and physical health

By: Kevin Sayre

Period 4

The modern day is filled with a variety of different games and consoles, ranging from

games about war to games about farming and buying new tractors. There are many ties to video

games and improvement in vision like being able to see things zipping across the screen. while

sometimes gaming is taken too far and can create problems like obesity and potentially carpel

tunnel but if kept in control it can be beneficial to the player. Gaming can also be linked to

increased reaction time, as well as increased motor skills, these things can be helpful at school

like while writing an essay or when playing a sport

Furthermore, video games with lots of action help improve vision and sharpness of

eyesight these statements are proven in source one “action video games change the way our

brains process visual information.” “after just 30 hours of playtime video gamers showed a

substantial increase in their spacial resolution of their vision.” To elaborate when playing games

such as “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Seige” or “Escape from Tarkov” require you to see your

enemy first and take them down before they can kill you. If you can’t see well then, your chances

of survival are slim. If you can see well, you can take out your enemy and make it to the next

round. So, in turn video games can be beneficial too physical health

Sometimes gaming is taken too far like when kids stay up all night on a school night

playing games, not getting anywhere near the recommended 9 hours sleep whatsoever this is bad

for the person and it can be prevented by setting timers on the games and prohibiting play on the
weekdays in turn causing the health of the player to increase instead of decreasing. According to

source three “yet despite all the warnings about the risks of insufficient sleep include poor

academic performance and obesity.” “her husband banned computer use except for homework

on week days they also enforced a 10 pm bedtime and put limits on the other games” while

preventing overuse of video games is good for health and will prevent obesity and carpel tunnel

as well as increasing sleep and academic performance, video games should still be played and

not completely taken away because they are beneficial to health

Finally, video games are also beneficial for reaction time and motor skills when playing

video games that require your hands and eyes to move quickly making the brain react faster as

well as being preformed efficiently. “the ability to search for an object in a jungle of other things

or to keep track of a steady stream of object zipping by the screen.” This evidence from source

one explains how video games help improve reaction time and hand eye coordination. When you

are attacked in a game such as “the walking dead” you go into something called a quick time

event(QTE) which will prompt you to react quickly and do a variety of different button presses

and if you fail to react in time you will possibly fail and have to restart. So games do have a

positive physical effect.

To top it all off video games are beneficial in many different ways like improving

eyesight hand eye coordination and reaction time, being able to improve all these skills using

video games is incredibly beneficial for example being able to react quickly when a ball is being

thrown at you and catching it helps when playing sports, improving your motor skills can help

when writing a essay and improving handwriting. So to conclude video games do affects players

physical health weather or not its positive or negative all depends on the players use.