As technology and science advance throughout the years, game industries have also mustered up efforts and coming up with fresh ideas to take gaming to a whole new level of experience and entertainment. In this modern era, everyone of all ages has access to video games as we can see video games can be played on many medias like on our mobile phone, computer, and gaming console. Video games is popular among our youths especially college students. But there have been complications that their hobby of playing video games have cause a downfall upon their daily lives schedule and their academic performance is most affected by their habit of playing games. This paper discusses the impacts of video games on students’ academic performance which are evaluated and analyzed based on the amount of time spent on playing video games, emotions experienced by students while playing games, genre of games played by students, video games as an educational tool for students and behavior adopted by students from playing video games.
First and foremost, there is a negative connection between the measure of time spent on playing video games and the scholastic execution of understudy which is resolved from their GPA and SAT scores. The impacts of playing video games towards students’ academic performance become more devastating as playing game time increases. Students that likes gaming are prone to spend too much time on it that they missed or forgot to get involve with school events, get their homework done and attend social gatherings with their friends. Self-control is a key practice to evade playing too many games which is by setting our priorities according to their importance, so we can resist playing video games at times where we are supposed to learn and study. In addition, there is a relation between balancing the time spent between academic and gaming with achieving good grades. Moreover, addiction to playing video games is a major problem and cause to the students’ academic downfall. Messerly defined addiction as an enthusiastic conduct, drew in without balance that legitimately hurts one’s life. Gaming addiction can lead to many consequences on the students’ academic performance and social relationship which then makes them feel awkward when they have to confront society. They seek refuge from video games to realize their personal fantasies to become someone else in the virtual world and forget about the harsh and unforgiving world that they live in.
Furthermore, control in gaming takes into account the mischief done by computer game to be diminished. Moderate commitment in gaming can prompt improved execution in scholastic setting. To counter addiction of playing video games among students, playing video games in moderation is the first step to stop being an addict or to stop playing games forever. This process is time consuming but if the students were to find a new passion that is more fun than playing video games, the students will surely try to put a moderate limit to playing video games knowing that they have other commitments to fulfill. Secondly, experiences from playing video games triggers a variably wide range of emotions which mostly are not pleasant and negative. For example, increased aggressive cognition by students who played violent video games. Anderson and Bushman stated the illustrations (for example blood) and sounds (for example shouts) of savage video games were bleeding edge. An increased in aggressiveness of the students is related to the rate of exposure to violent games. The game industry did not evaluate these violent games properly and considering all effects that could happen to their consumer. The rating for these violent games is usually rated appropriate for all and therefore has increased exposure of these games to all gamers of all ages. Besides that, non-violent video games can expand arousal. The increase in arousal that games can provide in response to specific game features towards students in playing non-violent video games. Sometimes the content of non-violent video games can be over the limit until it makes the students feel aroused towards video games even though it is just a picture virtually.
The effects of arousal will make the students not focus on what they do in their life especially in academic. They will be addicted to that arousal video games provide and will have some problems in academic such as their CGPA drops. What’s more, the aggressive contents of video games call for the diminishing of empathy in students’ that play video games. Aggressive contents of video games drastically effect in a negative way on students’ empathy. If the students exposed themselves to violent video games frequently, the possibility the students’ empathy decreases because of the violent scene in the games will make the students become familiar with violence, hence their ability to be considerate and sympathize towards others drops. When the students lose their emotion to feel empathy, aggressiveness takes hold of their being and the students would rebel if there are things that does not go as their plan.
Thirdly, the genre of video games played by the students also bears a negative impact on their academic achievements. As such, Messerly reported that there is something especially addictive, if not vile, relating to role playing games. As to why students are most obsessed with this type of games is because they use it as a way to relieve their stress and escape from the reality world by jumping into the virtual world. Video games provide with things that the students do not possess in the real world like creating their own characters in the virtual worlds with all the traits, abilities, and personality which in reality they lack of. These students give excuses for they preference to play games like saying they want some alone time, saying that it is difficult to maintain human relationships and saying that getting familiarize with today’s high-tech computer is actually for job preparation. Next, single player and multiplayer games each have their very own positive effect that enhanced students’ academic performance. Single player mostly consists of a huge open world map, this allows for the students to relieve their stress on playing video games. Multiplayer gaming unlike single-player gaming has connections with lower performance of students in reading. Multiplayer focuses more on communication, strategic thinking and problem solving when dealing some problems in video games. Other than that, the use of video games is causally identified with an expansion in visual spatial abilities. This particular skill is extremely useful for academic subjects of science, mathematics, technology, and engineering. Such games that can benefit students is the strategy games variety which helps in the field of the students’ cognitive skills such as extracting three-dimensional information from two dimensional sources. This may put gaming into a positive aspect but self-control and moderation in gaming still needs to be taken account so that the negative effects of gaming will not overpower the students. However, video games can be as a means to be an educational tool in improving the students’ academic performance. For instance, video games have been perceived as a compelling subjective preparing worldview.
From playing video games, students can train their cognitive skills although only a specific aspect of it is affected such as attentional skills. An experiment conducted by Green and Bavelier found that video game players had the capacity to take care of a greater number of items than non-video game players, they reasoned that this distinction in attentional expertise might be interceded by heights among computer game players in their visual momentary memory aptitudes . Most games only attack and test a specific cognitive skill throughout the entire game. If a game’s content focuses on attentional skill, then only this skill that will improve over time and be assessed throughout the game’s storyline. On the other hand, there is a relationship between perseverance and persistency of students playing games and their academic performance. Students who play video games persistently is found to spend a lot of time working on solving academic. This is like a force of habit by the students who frequent playing games. Just like getting frustrated not able to pass a level or a checkpoint in games, these students might feel the same way when they encounter a problem they cannot complete. Video game players invested fundamentally longer measures of time taking a shot at unsolved re-arranged word and conundrums. Equally important, improvement of the students’ problem-solving skill is associated with the type of games played by the students. Strategy and role playing are the only genre of games which allow for the possibility for an increased problem-solving skill with respect to time. Adachi and Willoughby (2013) found that strategy games may show the player to initially assemble data and think about a technique to tackle an issue. Supported assuming of role-playing games after some time may build players’ critical thinking abilities.
Finally, behaviors portrayed in video games that are adopted by the students could change their personality. Gentile, Anderson, Yukawa, Ihori, Saleem, Ming, Shibuya, Liau, Khoo, Bushman, Huesmann and Sakamoto reported that prosocial conduct has concentrated on the contrary side – how playing fierce video games lower prosocial conduct.
The students choose their games preference therefore they are the ones that choose to expose themselves to either the positive or negative effects of video games. If the students play violent games more frequently, the more the possibility they turn aggressive and if they prefer playing games with prosocial content more than the other genres, the likeliness they will exhibit prosocial behavior is high. To instill and educate prosocial behavior among students that play video games, the games’ contents need to have a myriad of scenes and scripts encouraging prosocial behaviors. In a like manner, students who play video games sometimes get themselves involved with discipline problems such as skipping class and not submitting assignments.
Students that puts gaming first before their responsibility are the ones likely to get themselves in detention in college as they have lost interest in school and decided gaming is more important. There are claims that individuals that initiate the publicized shoot killings in schools in America are students that highly played video games, but this is not solid evidence because there is no research being done on it. The students’ failure to follow college rules is because they play video games too much that they do not have time to finish their homework and they also sleep late at night playing games that they end up missing classes on the following day. Another matter is the correlation between students that experience time distortion during gameplay and their academic achievements. There are students who play games without the awareness of how much time has elapsed and these causes them to lose and not having enough time to complete their assignments. These students are too absorbed into the gameplay as if their mind has entered into the game itself. This could be the main cause to why student spent a huge amount of time gaming because playing games helps them forget the hardships of the real world they faced and in the virtual world, they can be as anything that their hearts desire. In conclusion, effects of video games on the students’ academic performance can be assessed through observing the students’ gameplay time, video games induced emotions of students during gaming, the category of games the students played, video games as an education aid and habits pick up in video games by students.
Video games can be either beneficial or destructive depending on how the students handle their gaming passion. Video games can be a medium to relieve stress or accumulate stress depending what game it is. It depends on our choice whether to play games wisely or uncontrollably which gives us different outcomes. But then, the real world also can give us an experience like in the video games as well. We just need to have the courage and the right intentions to go explore the world and try out new hobbies and experiences that will bring out the best what life can give us. Life is like a video game itself and you are the main character in your life. So, go on and win the game.
