Board Thread:Games Tent/@comment-33575901-20190222212229/@comment-31322722-20190226031800

Fdsse438 wrote: I hate the internet, and love school. I also don't play very many video games. I like books. I used to like school, until I had to wake up super early and each day was the same routine, over and over again. It’s enough to drive someone insane.

I don’t think the Internet is worth hating, tbh. It is very flawed, but it also brings people together to create amazing things. Also, studies show that although some teens report depressive episodes due to social media, there are a great number of teens that reported feeling less lonely due to the Internet, despite mostly being limited in real life friendships. And in all the ways that the Internet has made people emotionally unstable, it has also prevented people from taking drastic action. It has kind of a balance, when you think about it.

In addition to that, teens using the Internet develop a lot of real-world skills necessary for life in our time, the 21st century, such as collaborating. Similarly, video games, even those such as Fortnite, have been proven to increase social interaction and confidence in introverts. Any claims of video games causing violence have been disproven by now. Video games are also considered to be a form of art, considering so much work goes into the story, the animations, the visual appeal, the sound effects, the music... and something that has been seeing a massive increase in the gaming community, more specifically in indie games, extra thought into how the player interacting with the game can lead to new possibilities.

Games like “That Dragon, Cancer” are very artistic. Although they really don’t have any gameplay, they tell a meaningful story, full of metaphors and emotional imagery. But it would never be the same as a movie. The player’s interactions in the game make that much of a difference (for instance, the “racing minigame”, where everything is easy and fun at first, but the obstacles get more and more difficult to avoid, until they are literally unavoidable. This is a metaphor for how the parents in the game — and in real life, this being based on a heart-wrenching true story — slowly accept reality and become more hopeless as time goes on, and things don’t improve). It is definitely not the only game to use such methods of storytelling.

In a more literal sense, gaming has also been proven to improve hand-eye coordination, as well as quick reflexes. And it’s not hard to see how it does so.

But you know... books are cool too.