What do Teens Really Learn From Video Games?

Time spent playing video games can be a bane or a boon, depending on how parents and teens approach the subject. There are hundreds of educational games, which are aimed at teaching children and young teenagers not only school subjects, but many different real-life experiences including farming, construction design, and processes of earning money through work. Then again, other games teach military tactics, the use of weapons and how to flaunt the law and society in general. Depending on what the teenagers and their families find appropriate to learn will affect how popular the game will become.

The whole idea behind a video game programmer’s efforts to create a popular game is to find topics that interest the kids. The positive aspect of these games is that the players get to experience a lot of real life activities that they normally would never have. It allows kids to develop concepts of what they may like, and choose what sort of career or field of study interests them. A lot of the newer game systems have the game controls designed to simulate the instruments needed to play the games, such as guitars, drums, tennis racquets, guns, paddles, etc. It is more entertaining to have the game-specific controllers, and learning the feel of these instruments makes the game more life-like.

Not everyone will say that the violent games with lots of fighting and explosions are a bad thing. There are some who feel that the games are not so much about violence as they are about handling tense situations, military defense and conflicts in general. Learning to make quick decisions and how exploit weak spots are all part of real-life scenarios, such as driving in traffic and business deals. Every moment spent playing the adrenaline pumping games is a step towards preparing to join adult society.

Over the past 30 years or so games have evolved to a status beyond standard education, meaning teens and young adults prefer to learn more from games than textbooks. Ask any teen how much time they spend playing video games as compared to studying, and average it out over the course of a year. The modern countries of the world are raising video game addicts. Now if society focuses on the positive aspects of video games as encouraging youths to expand their horizons through virtual simulations, then it can’t be all bad. The important rule to remember is that nothing should be done to an extreme, and as long as this generation of teenagers doesn’t stay home from school and work to play games, then life should go on as normal.