Coordination such as the sims holding relationships

coordination such as The Sims, holding relationships with other characters and balancing their
virtual lives, they allow for other cognitive skills (Johnson).
Critical thinking skills are also gained while playing video games. As explained by
Steven Johnson, “The premise that games teach generalized skills that apply in real-world
situations has been corroborated by recent studies.” After all the research done with gamers and

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non-gamers, they found that there are many positive connotations. Video games make you
analyze what is at hand and how you are going to overcome the task. When you constantly die in
a shooting game, you find out what you are doing wrong and what the other team is doing and
then you find ways to counter them and get many kills. There are so many pros that come hand
and hand in playing video games. Yes in any video games you could fail or die. But that is the
beauty about video games. They give you millions and millions of tries to succeed and feel how
it feels to win. A popular game that gives you this feeling of sanity and wanting to keep trying to
get your high score would be Tetris. In this game you have to use your brain to see where the
blocks fit and how you could create a strategy to clear the lines and gain your high score. The
game allows you to see the upcoming block so you use your critical thinking skills to see how
you could fix the blocks so the next piece could fit.
With these all being thought of, many will say what about action games? Won’t they
correlate with gamers being violent and committing harmful crimes? Many would believe
playing games such as Call of Duty or any shooting games can promote aggressive behaviors.
But basically any game can cause this type of behavior due to the fact that if you fail, this could
lead to raging or high levels of anger. In first-person shooter games, if you constantly keep dying
and you can’t control your anger, you could build up a lot of hatred and protrude those feelings
on others outside of the gaming community. “Studies have shown that playing violent video
games can increase aggressive thoughts, behaviors, and feelings in both the short-term and long-
term(Goldbeck and Pew).” Although it can cause all these things, you could play video games as
a stress reliever. From studies by Christopher J. Ferguson, he found that, “...violent games reduce
depression and hostile feelings in players through mood management…” You could release this
anger towards the game instead of others. If given a difficult or stressful challenge in the game,

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to relieve all the tension, one could play games that don’t cause these aggressions such as music
games, sports games, etc. Playing video games are not bad at all. There are many assumptions
about video games being violent but many studies show that “According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon
General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and
the quality of home life, not media exposure (Jenkins).” This shows that violence and shootings