Risks of video games

Violence

Many video games propose to you to incarnate a gangster, a pirate or a demon, to hurt others, to steal them, even to kill them. So we reassure you right away, it’s not because you play this type of game that you’re a murderer in the making. At present, no scientist has been able to prove that playing violent video games makes you violent in real life. But we discovered other very interesting and disturbing things.

When you play these kinds of games often, you get used to the violence you see. It becomes ordinary violence and your brain becomes less and less receptive to it as if it were normal. Besides, it has been shown that these games, when played by people under the required age (see PEGI standards), act on their empathy. As a reminder, empathy is the ability to identify with others, to put oneself in their place, to feel what they feel. Well, people who practice these games regularly generate less empathy than others. And we can test it!

A scientist made a very interesting experience. He brought players together in his lab and had them play different games. Some of them played violent games where they played villains, while others played similar games, but this time their role was to save people, they were the kind. After several hours of play, the researcher stopped the screens and offered a reward to the players to thank them for their participation. The reward was a basket filled with confectionery and the rule was simple: one per person, otherwise there would not be enough for everyone. Did you already guess what happened? The people who had played the role of “wicked” did not waste time to gather whole handles.

Fortunately, everyone found “normal” empathy several hours after the experience. This means that it does not disappear forever, but it is more discreet when we spend our day virtually shooting at people. And with less empathy, violence has more room to express itself, unfortunately.

Addiction?

You probably noticed the question mark in the title. He is there because the experts are not unanimous on whether the video game provokes addiction or not. Sometimes we talk about “video game disorder” or “problem gambling”. Without going into detail, these three terms refer to the fact that a person loses his autonomy in the face of a product (drug) or behavior (gambling, video games, web, etc.). When this happens, the person loses his freedom of choice, he cannot imagine his life [CS2] without the substance or the behavior incriminated.

What is important to understand is that we do not fall into consumption or problematic behaviors by chance. Originally, there is suffering, a malaise, which could be, at first, relieved by the consumption of drugs or video games. The problem is that with time, it is this consumption that becomes a problem, in addition to the already existing suffering! So far from relieving, this worsens the long-term problems.

For example, specialists in the field are often confronted with young people in situations of academic phobia. That is to say that for several reasons that may vary (such as being a victim of school bullying without being able to talk about it), these people divest the school to over-invest video games, to relieve their suffering. But this only aggravates the problem in reality, as the youth moves away from his friends, creates conflict with his family and does nothing more than play.

Lack of physical activity (diabetes, cardiovascular disease)

It is repeated everywhere, physical activity is essential to be in good health. For fifty years, we have access to many technologies that make our life easier, but that creates health problems! Do you want some examples? The escalator and the elevator. If indeed it is useful for people with reduced mobility or luggage, the slam-slack that is dormant in us does not hesitate to use them to excess, even if it is necessary to wait until the elevator arrives while the stairs would save us time. Another example is the mobile phone. To make a call at the time, you had to walk to the nearest phone booth. To send a message? Well, we had to go to the post office! To listen to music? Go to the record store. Today, everything is just a click away and we’ve never moved so far using our bodies. There is a landmark study on this, which says that in the 1950s, one walked on average 4 hours per day, for work, studies, sport or recreation. Today, we move less than an hour a day and a city dweller would not do more than 800 meters of walking on a day! It is not surprising to see a lot of diseases develop, especially since the human body is made to move.