Gaming is emerging as a new industry and a new field where children and youth build a life upon. Well, it’s not totally new for the manufacturers but rather for gamers. “Gamer” is even emerging as a professional career. However, this new field is a natural consequence of the new technologies that were introduced and the technological developments. Thus, the impact of gaming is more interesting today than ever before (Hastings et al., 2009).
This new emergence of gaming or e-sport has several aspects to discuss but mainly, the issue of violence in those video games. It has interesting impacts on children. Studies show that there is a relationship between violent content in video games and aggressive behavior. That is exposure to violent video games will result in aggressive behavior (Hastings et al., 2009). As anger management is a public health issue so the violent content of video games is in this way is contributing to this issue in an undesired way (Hastings et al., 2009).
Another issue with gaming or the dream about being a professional gamer is addiction. It’s of course a promising profession for children. However, the dream may not always come true and the issue can result in addictional behavior which is another public health issue (Lobel et al., 2017). This addiction as any other addiction has negative effects in the long term as well as in the short term such as dropping out of school or failing in school (Horowitz, 2007).
Hence, heavy and unhealthy gaming behavior has nowadays become related to public health issues. Actually, it has been discussed on an international level (Chung, Sum, and Chan, 2021). Moreover, the effects were studied from the perspective of the gamers’ health condition. The studies suggested that excessive and problematic gaming would result in personal health issues such as low self-esteem, low daily life-satisfaction, family conflicts, and more (Chung, Sum, and Chan, 2021).
Finally, this essay is not discussing that gaming, in general, is problematic but rather the issue that is discussed here is the excessive and problematic gaming is a public health issue as it’s related to addiction and other public health problems. On the other hand, the issue is related to personal health as well.
References
Hastings, E., Karas, T., Winsler, A., Way, E., Madigan, A. and Tyler, S., 2009. Young Children’s Video/Computer Game Use: Relations with School Performance and Behavior. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 30(10), pp.638-649.Lobel,
A., Engels, R., Stone, L., Burk, W., and Granic, I., 2017. Video Gaming and Children’s Psychosocial Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(4), pp.884-897.
Horwitz, A.. A Career in Computer Games. In Lundfall, C., Nyström, R., & Clayton, J. (Eds), Blueprint A: Version 2.0 (pp.31-55).Stockholm Liber (2007)
Chung, T., Sum, S. and Chan, M., 2021. Time to call for a global public health approach in the prevention of the onset and progression of problematic gaming. [online] Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Available at: <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6426386/> [Accessed 13 April 2021].
3 Kommentarer
[…] hand, children’s demands and needs have changed as well over the past 100 years. Previously, children created their games and met physically to play while nowadays, children meet over the electronic […]
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