What is Gaming and is it healthy?

Gaming can bring on a lot of different feelings depending on who you are and who you grew up around. Could gaming have benefits you might not know about?

In this post I am going to be going over some of the pros and cons of gaming . I hope this will give everyone a better understanding of gaming and how it may have some long term affects.

To start things off a pro, the neurogenesis (growth of new neurons) actually takes place in the brains of gamers. We all know that grey matter is an indicator of intelligence in the brain. A study showed increased grey matter in the brains of gamers. This means you are literally building brain muscle by gaming. Definitely something to remember the next time someone tells you that gaming will rot your brain.

Since the inception of mainstream console and computer gaming in the 1970s, fault-finders have constantly voiced their concerns for first-person shooters, 'beat 'em ups' and fighting games.
However, countless studies have offered conflicting conclusions on how harmful video gaming could really be for your health, both mental and physical.

A con, in 2016, an American study found that young men who play violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto have a lower capacity for female empathy than those who play other games.
After playing Grand Theft Auto, in which women are presented as sexual objects, a large sample of teenage boys reported significantly lower levels of sympathy and compassion when shown a photo of a female victim of domestic violence.

"Aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, as wells as decreases in pro-social behaviour, empathy and sensitivity to aggression" were also cited as negative consequences of game playing in the APA report.

"While there is some variation among the individual studies, a strong and consistent general pattern has emerged from many years of research that provides confidence in our general conclusions," said Jacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist. In my opinion everyone makes there own choices in the end of the day. Not everyone chooses to believe everything they see and listens to every person they walk by, it's common sense.

Pro, In 2012, researchers from Canada's McMaster University discovered that playing video games can drastically improve the eyesight of the visually impaired. Playing a video game changes pathways in the brain, helping the gamer to distinguish more shades of grey. Called the contrast sensitivity function.

So video games as we can see have a number of ingredients that are actually really important for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., we just need to work harder on understanding what those active ingredients are so that we can then leverage them to deliver better games.

But is video gaming healthy? I guess it depends on who you are and what you want to get out of the gaming experience as a whole. Id say if you are easily manipulated gaming is not really for you, well unless your goal is to spend money or get pushed around the online community. Other wise gaming can be very beneficial or very harmful, lets pretend gaming is eating for a moment after all they both produce dopamine, if you are not eating the right foods or right quantity of said foods you will become fat and unhealthy.

There is a game for everyone. I myself enjoy quite a few, most played being Dota 2 and Csgo, tag a game you enjoy in the comments and i'll be sure to respond.

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