Good and bad effect of computer games

Click here for more info on video game addiction, how to treat it, and tips on how to avoid getting your kids addicted to video games. Most study participants mainly use an area of the brain called the caudate nucleus. It appears that this causes an increase in the amount of gray matter in their caudate nucleus, while it decreases in the hippocampus.

However players who play games that requires players to navigate using spatial strategies like the 3D Super Mario games have increased grey matter in the hippocampus.

Too much video game playing makes your kid socially isolated. Also, he may spend less time in other activities such as doing homework, reading, sports, and interacting with the family and friends. On the other hand, a study by researchers at the North Carolina State University, New York and the University Of Ontario Institute Of Technology points out that gamers usually do not replace their offline social lives with online game playing, but rather it expands them.

In fact, among gamers, being a loner is not the norm. Some video games teach kids the wrong values. Violent behavior, vengeance and aggression are rewarded. Negotiating and other nonviolent solutions are often not options. Women are often portrayed as weaker characters that are helpless or sexually provocative. If your child is struggling in one of his school subjects, there are many educational computer games available for him.

These games can be both fun and educational for your children. To reduce the negative effects of computer games its a good idea to develop a few ground rules around your house. Second, place computers in public areas such as the living room. This will allow you to control both the amount and the quality of media they consume.

Finally, make sure to model good technology habits yourself. Don't overdo your own screen time, put screens away at mealtimes, prioritize family and outside time, and model putting away all screens for family mealtimes. Education is an essential key to injury prevention.

Gamers need to be educated on how to protect their thumbs, wrists, and elbows, their waistlines, their emotional state, their sleep, and their eyes. Simple education around taking breaks, stretching, eating healthy snacks, and resting and icing your thumb, wrist, or elbow when it starts hurting can address injuries early, before they become significant. For the eyes, gamers can try the rule: every 20 minutes, try to look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

In short, playing video games can be fun and a social activity when integrated into a healthy lifestyle that includes plenty of sleep, exercise, and good nutrition, rather than letting the game become your life. As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles.

No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician. Beneath the skin, your hands are an intricate architecture of tendons, joints, ligaments, nerves, and bones.

Each of these structures is vulnerable to damage from illness or injury. If your hands hurt, even simple tasks can become a painful ordeal. Healthy Hands: Strategies for strong, pain-free hands describes the causes and treatments for many conditions that can cause hand pain. It also features information on hand exercises, as well as handy tools and other gadgets that take strain off your hands.

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Get helpful tips and guidance for everything from fighting inflammation to finding the best diets for weight loss Stay on top of latest health news from Harvard Medical School. This will help your child build the skills required to work together as a team and solve problems together. Games function in real-time, and most games are fast-paced and require the player to make quick decisions in a short period of time.

This helps in sculpting decision-making skills that are valuable in real-life fields such as sports or medicine, where split-second decisions under pressure are often required to be taken. Video games can help your kid maintain a good level of accuracy by learning to calculate all the dependent parameters fast.

This is an extremely useful skill, which is why even soldiers and doctors are advised to play video games to sharpen their decision-making skills. By playing video games, kids understand hand-eye coordination — they begin to learn how the movement of their limbs affects the space and visual references around them. Good hand-eye coordination is essential for daily life activities; it is also required in nearly all sports activities and can even be beneficial in puzzle-solving.

When a certain skill is repeated multiple times, the brain starts developing a structure and creates new neural pathways and transmitters to optimise its functioning. In times when intense concentration is applied, the brain moulds itself to be able to solve problems faster, which can ultimately also help in solving issues in real life.

Constantly sitting in one place and playing video games at length can increase the chances of obesity, weaken the muscles and joints, make hands and fingers numb due to over-exertion, and multiple studies suggest that it can even weaken the eyesight. The fun that video games provide is in stark contrast to a typical day in school. This can cause kids to prefer video games over anything else, thus pushing them to not pay attention to school work. Even outside school, they may skip homework or studying for tests and choose video games instead.

This can result in poor performance and affect their emotional intelligence. Many video games in the market contain excessive violence, over-the-top sexuality, profanity, racism, and many other things that cannot be perceived by kids in the right manner. They may fail to take these depictions with a pinch of salt and may end up trying to emulate the same behaviour as portrayed in the games.