James Zhan

Video games have come a long way and now the technology is very developed, as we can see how hyper-realistic the graphics are and how incredibly intelligent the AIs are. Putting aside people who develop games and who game for a living, I wonder if video games as a sheer form of entertainment actually provide any important values to a heavy gamer's life–by heavy gamer I mean someone who spend most of their time gaming not for profit or work. Also, in this context, I'm referring to non-educational games, so not the games that is meant to educate kids, but games that is meant to entertain, such as DOTA, Far Cry, Infamous Son, Counter Strike etc. Take Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for example, some kids play it night and day, and all they do is shooting people. One could argue that such time can be spent on reading, an activity that provides not only entertainment, but also important values.

Just for the sake of bouncing off ideas with people, another argument I could think of is that, even though some games might have educational values, they probably don't improve things like literacy as much as reading a book does. I also keep thinking that if a person play violin 24/7, they would become a virtuoso, where as if they play games 24/7, no matter how educational the game is, I doubt they would obtain any actual skills.

Now before you think I'm an anti-gamer, I want to clarify that I'm not. I have played lots of games. I just wanted to occupy one side of argument so that it might be easier for other people to take another (or agree on my side).

This topic sometimes occurs to my mind when I see people just play games 24/7 (again, excluding professional gamers and game developers); they don't care about other things other than their games. It sometimes seems to be like an addictive mind drug. Such things don't really happen to people who enjoy other forms of entertainment (music, movies, sports etc), which is what makes the games a different kinds of entertainment than those, in my opinion.

Take away video games from one's life, I would tend to think it wouldn't do much harm to a person (assuming that they are not addicted already), but if you take away other arts from someone's life, I think that would actually do some sort of damage to them. So how valuable is gaming to one's life? Is gaming just pretty much wasting time? If you were a heavy gamer, how would you justify all your time spent on gaming?