Monitor video games, amount of time kids spend playing them

Like most tech­nol­ogy, video game tech­nol­ogy has changed dra­mat­i­cally. Most par­ents can remem­ber spend­ing a rainy Sat­ur­day after­noon play­ing Pong or putting their quar­ters in games like Aster­oids or Pac Man at the local video arcade. Today, kids are play­ing first-person shooter games like Call of Duty and Halo.

First-person shooter games allow the game player to look down the bar­rel of the gun they are using and actu­ally become the char­ac­ter being por­trayed in the game. These games were designed after mil­i­tary com­bat sim­u­la­tors. Dur­ing World War II, the U.S. Army dis­cov­ered that shoot­ing at bull’s eye tar­gets did not prop­erly pre­pare sol­diers for com­bat. The military’s research found that sol­diers were not able to point their weapons at another human being and pull the trig­ger after prac­tic­ing on a bull’s eye tar­get. The Army devel­oped pop-up tar­gets shaped like a human being and sol­diers’ fir­ing rates went from about 15 per­cent dur­ing WWII to about 95 per­cent dur­ing the Viet­nam War. Mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment agen­cies have been using com­puter gen­er­ated sim­u­la­tors to teach sol­diers and offi­cers to shoot accu­rately at another “human being” who pos­sess a threat. These sim­u­la­tors come with guns that recoil and allow reload­ing. This same tech­nol­ogy is now avail­able to our kids on their home video game systems.

For decades, researchers have been telling us that kids who are exposed to vio­lence on TV and movies become desen­si­tized to other’s feel­ings and emo­tions. Newer research indi­cates kids who play vio­lent video games not only become less sen­si­tive toward oth­ers, they are also more likely to be more aggres­sive when some­one makes them angry. Researchers found kids who fre­quently played vio­lent video games were more likely to act out vio­lently to unin­ten­tional provo­ca­tion such as being bumped into accidentally.

Desen­si­ti­za­tion and aggres­sive behav­ior are not the only neg­a­tive side effects of vio­lent video games. Other research indi­cates exces­sive expo­sure to vio­lent video games can cause an increase in heart rate, even dur­ing rest, which can cause a dis­rup­tion in sleep pat­terns. Play­ing video games too much can also dis­tract kids from school work and because many video games are played alone, kids inhibit their abil­ity to inter­act socially with others.

Some research indi­cates play­ing video games can help increase eye-hand coor­di­na­tion and can help increase the brain’s abil­ity to quickly switch from one task to another. The types of games and the amount of time kids spend play­ing video games can be the key com­po­nents to whether or not they expe­ri­ence neg­a­tive effects. Mon­i­tor­ing the types of games your kids play and the amount of time they spend play­ing games can help keep our kids safe.

Keep­ing Our Kids Safe is brought to by the Delaware Police Depart­ment and School resource Offi­cer Rod Glazer.

Posted by Rod Glazer on Nov 4 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.