Why Gaming Isn’t as Bad as You Make It

In my opinion, most people are over hyping this “Video gaming disorder”. Most parents these days are stressing over how long their child spends on the internet. For most parents, they get worried about more than two hours, when in fact that is completely normal, the normal amount of time that should be spent online is about four hours. According to Dr Netta Weinstein, “Parents will ring me up and say, ‘I think my child’s addicted to playing video games,’ and I will say ‘Why do you think that?’ and then they say, ‘Because they’re playing four hours a day,’ I have to say, ‘That’s pretty normal.’” (Taken from ‘Dangerous gaming’ is the WHO right to classify excessive video game play as a health disorder)

“Part of the problem is how we use the word addiction.” Most of the time ‘addiction’ is confused with engagement and enthusiasm. Remember the old saying “Time flies when you have fun,” most of the time there is nobody to stop you from playing video games all day, if you over eighteen that is, that is the real problem, is when you are not stopping your child from playing video games more that four hours or so a day.

There are many diseases and disorders, but gaming is not one of them. How could you give a diagnosis if you are not trained in that field of work? Well Dr Netta Weinstein agrees, “That’s just rubbish, because you can’t be given a diagnosis unless it’s from a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist.” Let’s say I made up a disorder, let’s call it Clinically Not-So-Smart or Clinical NSS for short, now the signs of Clinical NSS are as following, low iq score, not spending an hour a day practicing all school subjects, and you are/were not in the smartest of the smart classes in school. Do you have one of these “Symptoms” because if so, you should see a doctor, because that could mean that you have Clinical NSS. Clinical NSS is a very bad disorder, because it is said to “Slowly deteriorate brain cells.” There you go, easy as that, there is a new disorder, see how easy that was? If it was that easy for me to come up with a disorder, what’s telling you that the WHO (World Health Organization) didn’t do this themselves?

It may seem like a lie, but there are some positives from playing video games, I have better social skills, better hand eye coordination, better typing skills, in fact I don’t even need to look at the keyboard to know what I am typing. You can learn big words, like objective at a young age, you learn a little about history too, this is also true because of most war games are based off of an actual war. Gaming makes you think about things, should I invest my money, or save my money. Of course, there is also reaction times, most people have pretty fast reflexes, but most pro league gamers have a reaction time of less than a second! If that isn’t impressive, then I don’t know what is.

So there you have it, reasons why gaming isn’t as bad as the media and others make it seem. In my opinion most people are over hyping this “Video gaming disorder.”