A teen playing the XBOX 360.

About 28 years ago, only the most experienced gamers owned a SNES(Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Flash-forward to now  you can find a shirt referencing the now dated ‘SNES’ console in your local superstore, and the retro games available for purchase on the online shop made by the very same company. Video games have been around since 1950’s, born from the thoughts of Ralph Baer, drastically changing in form and popularity over time. But one thing seems to be the same. There’s a love-hate relationship between video games, and the U.S. populace.

As the saying goes: “Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.”  Albeit possessing a somewhat blurry line, being addicted to video games isn’t an uncommon thing to hear about. Frequentness of such a thing has caused the reputation of the gaming industry to sour as a whole. If we look back, this is not the first time something has been so widely ostracized. Rap, hip-hop, and Rock have been excommunicated due to bringing something new to the table. But there’s way too many pros about video games to focus only on the cons.

Video games have helped the world in various ways:Action games force the player to take in more information than normally accepted, increasing their reaction time and boosting their observation skills in their daily lives."Gamers see the world differently. They are able to extract more information from a visual scene." Greg Applebaum- Associate Professor at Duke University.  Rhythm games force the player to adapt quickly and go with the flow of the song, hitting every note possible, trying to go for the highest score possible. Parties are online chat rooms that enables anyone attending to speak freely with one another, not unlike a group call on a phone. This further accentuates a gamer’s ability to cooperate with other people.

Don’t be so quick to throw a huge community such as this out the window. Take a step back and ask yourself, are video games as bad as I think? I’ve given all the evidence. Now it’s your turn to answer it the question for yourself.