Can You Be Smarter, Faster, and More Experienced?

While most of the world remains in quarantine, students are out of school, and organized sports have been cancelled, many people have turned to video games to fill the void that this pandemic has created. This way, they can still have interactions with their friends and keep in touch. So how can this possibly affect them? Do video games make one more intelligent, more determined, or will it just create a habit of staying inside and sitting in front of a television all day? There have been articles in the past about how video games can make you smarter, healthier, and increase skills. I find this extremely debatable due to the fact that few, if any, of these studies have proper evidence that prove this to be the case. Regardless, without doing our own massive studies, let’s check some examples, and see if we can use our common sense to determine whether video games can indeed make you more intelligent.

First Person Shooter Video Games

I’m going to start off with what most games today seem to include, guns and ammunition. I would like to know-how using a gun in a game can improve skills or make you smarter in real life. When I think of “skills” from playing a game and applying it to real life, I don’t imagine someone picking up a gun and instantly knowing what to do with it. Knowing to check the safety, keeping your finger off the trigger and people in real life don’t have force-fields or health bars are things you learn by physical experience. If someone gets shot there could be a life lost and penalties to pay. Video games teach that weapons have a lack of consequences when the reality is quite the opposite. I just don’t see how this can contribute to a person’s health, intelligence, and helping them in their daily lives. It’s a time filler for most people. They find a game and enjoy it and jump back to their lives once the system gets turned off.

Driving in Video Games

With a huge selection of car-oriented games out there, you have specific choices. Racing, car chasing, or along the lines of GTA V, where you can basically do anything with a car that you want. I’ve been driving cars for years, and can honestly say that I have never taken something from a video game and applied it to driving. You can play the game in the first or third person in most cases and pick whichever one doesn’t give you the most motion sickness. Some people play in a better mode than others. There have been recorded incidences where someone applied what However they learned in a game. The following article from The New York Daily News shows that an 11-year old with his parents’ permission took his parents car for a joy ride because the parents wanted the boy to stop playing Grand Theft Auto V, so they used their better judgment and let him see if he could apply himself on the real road with the “skills” he had learned from playing the game. I’m still trying to figure out who the smarter family member here is. There’s a reason why you have to wait until a certain age to be able to apply for a learner’s permit. You can’t apply certain video game aspects to real life. It is just asking for a whole world of trouble.  Drifting corners, trying to use the emergency brake, can be simply executed with a push of the button, however in person are difficult to perform. This is a very hot topic, as there are games out there to help enhance a person’s health, skills, and smarts. Such as games to help learn a different language, puzzle games, or just general calming games to help relax after a long day.   I’ve played games on the Nintendo DS that helped me with a Spanish class to learn more words and phrases. So with that information I want you to think about it, is it as all possible for a majority of games to help improve people’s lives, even though it’s a way to escape reality and just have some time to do stuff that you know will never happen in real life? Let me know by leaving a comment. Check out our last article right here and keep up to date with the latest info. Keep gaming everyone