Recently, video games have been more popular and attractive to children. There are many games which attract children such as World of Warcraft, Half Life, and so on. They often have eye-catching graphics, endless level and follow a story with interesting content; consequently, many individuals play and get fascinated. Spending a large amount of time playing video games can affect the young in three main areas: studying, community, and health.
Firstly, students’ marks will decline because of two reasons. There is a decline in studying time. According to data from American Time Use Survey (2016), citizens spend 8.83 hours sleeping, 1.18 hours eating and drinking, 5.12 hours doing other activities including studying activities (p.24). Nearly two-third of time per day is spent on sleeping, eating, and other activities; therefore, if playing games takes a large amount of time, students will not have enough time to study at home as well as at school.
Furthermore, those students who get addicted to games will not be interested in doing homework and focus less on studies. The amount of necessary time to sleep of children from 6 to 13 years old is 9 to 11 hours, from 14 to 17 years old is 8 to 10 hours, and young adults and adults is 7 to 9 hours per night (National Sleep Foundation, n.d.). Hence, when children increase the time in playing games, they may sleep in class, which causes the distracting on lessons in class. Many students often do not do their homework in order to play video games (Raise Smart Kids, n.d.). As a result, they cannot catch up with friends in class and get low grades or fail in those courses.
The limitation of social relationships is another effect. Gamers’ relationship will become smaller if the young continues playing games all day. Playing games online increases the number of virtual friends while the number of friends in real life is decreased. Mileham (2007, p.139) noted that the real relationships lean toward the relationships with game world. According to a Second Life player, “in real life we go around with barriers around ourselves. In virtual worlds those barriers aren’t there”, (Ibid. p.141). When playing games excessively, most of the day are spent at home with a computer; thus, their friends and family are not interacted, and outdoor activities are missed.
Therefore, many gamers are scarce of real-life relationships, which increases chances to be isolated with social life. On the other hand, some players become taciturn or easily irritable. Losing in game causes the decline mood, and if one reminds of that failure, gamers will be grouchy or change their personality. For instance, from a website “Reddit”, a player with nickname “doggoesmeow”, shared that he becomes violent and loses temper really fast since he starts playing online video games, although he was such a calm guy before (n.d.). Additionally, playing game most of time will affect to one’s health. Daily habits are disorganized.
For example, playing games over night causes sleep disorders. Those who have stayed all night to play games for long periods can change their daily routine and explains for sleep deprivation. This is especially common when concentrating on video games, adolescents forget about time, and do not have meal on time; consequently, they eat fast food because of the lack of time in cooking. Fast foods contain a large amount of unhealthy fats, sugar, sodium and little nutrition value; thus, eating these foods everyday will cause obesity or heart diseases.
Furthermore, eyesight will be reduced. When using computer, lighting level is nearly a haft of lighting level in classroom; as a result, eyes have to adjust in different bright levels (Kozeis, 2009). Therefore, if continuing looking at computer screen, the eyes will be irritated. In addition, there are many games using a graphical user interface which affects a gamer’s retina, for example, blue light which harms the retina (Good, 2014, P.4).
In short, playing games most of time brings many drawbacks for one’s health, social life, and studying. On the other hand, video games can bring many benefits such as new type of learning (applying game in education) and quick thinking skills if the young can balance their time as well as choose appropriate types of games that they are playing. However, not many young citizens are able to control their bad habits of playing video games once they get addicted. Doing outdoor activities and getting busy are some solutions which will allow them to limit time of playing games and bring more benefits to themselves.
