9 Unforeseen Benefits of Playing Video Games
Parents often cut off video games for their children, viewing potential dangers that come with social disconnection, violence, disorganized sleep, and poor mental and physical health. But, video games have several benefits for children to develop numerous learning and life skills.
Video games are the most popular activities in modern childhood. With the hours of screen time, most children invest their time playing games. They get responses from parents for computer games consuming time, making them secretive and mentally inactive. But, you need to analyze things from two sides. Learn about both the positive and negative impacts of video games and conclude.
Are Video Games Safe for Children?
A child learns life skills through video games. Games help in brain stimulation, enhance hand-eye coordination, reduce stress, make your child creative and enrich multitasking skills. Computer games are not a waste of time but a medium to polish overall cognitive and child development.
You need to ensure your kid invests just an hour or more in video games. If they fail to limit their playing hours and extend games for 4 to 5 or more hours, games are harmful. Prolonged hours of screen time makes a child at risk of depression, anxiety, obesity, and vision problems.
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Benefits of Playing Video Games for Your Child:
Here are 9 unforeseen benefits of playing electronic video games for kids. Have a look and learn about the advantages and disadvantages of playing games.
1. Visual-spatial Skills:
Violent video games like Fortnite, PUBG, Free Fire, etc., have been popular games for children. At the same time, playing these games, a child plays as a third person where they control their character on the screen. They control character to complete a mission and to avoid hazards and distractions.
Action games like PUBG and Fortnite improve visual-spatial skills. They get basic knowledge of distance and space. They can quickly track mobile objects and their speed. They navigate their characters with a flash of visual arrays by discarding obstacles, detecting dangers, and completing the assigned mission by defeating enemies, building an island, or increasing synergy with teammates.
Since video games are designed with 3D effects, a child can accurately track multiple objects at once and their visual representation when rotated. It challenges quick brain activity, such games improve visual-spatial skills among children.
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2. Virtual Socialization:
Let’s talk about the social benefits of playing games on the computer and smartphones. Video games are often played with a team member. To play multiplayer games, a child tends to find new friends either online or with their classmates. While playing games as a team or squad, they continuously keep communication, plan their next moves and assign roles to each other.
Making new friends and playing games never keep children isolated. Improved social activity through virtual socialization makes them able to work properly as a team. They will know the importance of group work and coordination required to gain success or achieve the stated goals.
3. Problem-Solving:
Video games are the best ways to practically improve problem-solving skills in your child. Almost every game has a mission to be accomplished for victory. To achieve victory and complete challenges, children need to use their thinking power to improvise gaming skills.
Planning, organization, and thinking are basic problem-solving skills a kid needs to play games. Apart from beforehand planning, they need to constantly decide their next move. With such flexible thinking abilities, they will be good at defining solutions for risks in real life.
Along with hard work in improving gaming skills, a child makes proper use of the brain to think about victory critically. Hence, video games for kids are considered an effective way to boost a child’s problem-solving skills.
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4. Makes Persistent:
Video games make your child persistent. It teaches them never to give up and try again even after failure. Games are usually played for fun and to win. So, if one fails to gain victory, they learn their mistakes from previous games and correct mistakes in the next game. Such a motive for playing games makes a child firm and persistent.
Children who are into video games from an early age are the ones to be more confident. They are the ones to achieve one’s objective while working practically. Such children know the importance of learning opportunities as failure never stops them from quitting tasks; they are encouraged to work better next time.
There are 100s of games your kids can play and learn at the same time games like quizzes, cool math games, alphabet learning, language learning, and other educational games that are available online on Google Play and the Apple app store for free.
5. Leadership Skills:
When children play online multiplayer action games, they gain leadership skills. Roles are defined to one another to finish the game and get the title of winner. People of every age participate in a game, and with proper communication and coordination, the team leads to victory.
Holding the responsibility of a leader, children plans, assign roles in the game, or follow others’ commands. Such working ability as a team enhances leadership skills in your child. They learn about motivating and persuading factors which are important elements to holding leadership. Following each other’s commands and negotiating on disputes gives your child a chance to develop leadership skills.
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6. Multitasking Skills:
Gamers have more effective cognitive functions compared to non-gamers. In video shooting, violent, and adventurous games, a child needs to control their character on the screen. While doing so, they need to move their characters with the joystick. Along with using the joystick, they use other various buttons on their screen.
If some information pops up during the game, they can quickly view and control games at the same pace. Without viewing the buttons on-screen, they can control the exact button required to perform an upcoming move. Thus, video games aid a child in keeping track of other activities while being focused on a specific task.
7. Increased Concentration:
When a child is in gaming mode, they don’t want any distraction. They use headphones or earphones to have a close look at gaming activities. In shooter video games, GTA or Guitar Hero, proper concentration counts for better results. Children ignore any calls and text messages when they are into video games.
Through the experience of being focused, they learn about better productivity on the score. With increased concentration, those children in their adulthood can make their business productive. They understand the importance of being focused on specific goals and discarding any internal and external business distractions.
8. Improved Risk-taking Ability:
A child playing games like PUBG, Fortnite, and GTA are challenging by nature and likely to take risks. When they use their avatar in-game, they risk being defeated, attacked by enemies, and death. Because of uncertain attacks or deaths, they always plan to move and find a secure position to remain alive.
Gamers can quickly respond to attacks from opponents and take risks even though one’s life is at stake. Such actions improve concentration and the ability to deal with any risk. And strategic risk-takers are supposed to perform better in a business environment.
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9. Enriched Creativity:
When starting to play new video games, most people don’t go through a series of instructions playing. Kids play games when they see their friends or siblings play or watch games on youtube. They start the game and, with their creativity, they try to complete the mission.
It does have risks, and consequences and a child encounters numerous stressful situations. But, they use their creative effects to defeat any stressful situations. For instance, Minecraft is all about creativity. A player needs to collect objects and design a 3D world. In such challenges, a child uses their creativity to survive and create buildings and supplies. So, overall, video games upgrade creativity power.
Conclusion:
Video games are beneficial for children but, this doesn’t mean there is no limit to playing games. Spending certain screen time is good for the physical and mental stability of your child. One of the most asked questions by parents regarding gaming is about discord. So we have a detailed review about it. You can check out Is Discord Safe?
Enhanced visual-spatial skills, problem-solving, visual socialization, persistence, leadership, and multitasking ability are some of the benefits of video games. Further, it helps to increase concentration, risk-taking ability, and creativity. Overall, video games have negative effects and are advantageous too, so it’s on you to allow or restrict your child from playing games.