As playing online games involves staring into a screen for long periods, it is often perceived as not worth a greater discussion. However, online gaming clearly offers some benefits for youngsters. Games require a certain level of skills and interactions from the player, unlike, for instance, watching television, which is somewhat passive. While addiction to games can pose concerns for parents and teachers, playing games can also positively affect children and young people.
Potential Benefits of Gaming for Kids & Young Adults
1. Excellent Stress Buster
There’s nothing like signing in to the virtual world after a long, exhausting day at work. Gaming has proven to be an outstanding source of stress relief. The moment you press play, you’re immersed in the game’s universe and its intricacies. For a little while, you can put your worries to rest and live your fantasies exactly the way you want them to.
Whether it be to dig treasure or to build castles, or assassinate a high-profile target, you are momentarily drawn away from the struggles of the real world. This enables our brains to feel relieved, and therefore, we’d recommend online games to all and sundry.
2. Improve Problem-Solving Skills
Video games are packed with challenges. While some games are mindless (like Space Invaders), some others — ranging from puzzles and crime mysteries to erecting virtual cities and empires — offer both children and adults the opportunity to address problems and work around finding solutions to them.
Research says that kids who play games show improvements in 3 critical areas: flexible thinking, planning, and strategizing. That being said, it’s not fully evident that these skills can directly leave an impact on daily lives. It’s also difficult to pinpoint the levels of improvement in real-world skills by playing games.
3. Enhance Visual-Spatial Skills
Many games, such as Minecraft, are set in 3D virtual worlds that young gamers have to navigate without a GPS or a map application providing directions. This helps children to practice their visual-spatial skills as well. It can give them a clearer understanding of concepts like space and distance.
Even when multiplayer online games like Grand Theft Auto provide maps, the ability to explore the game’s universe within a sandbox-style setup is bound to intrigue almost every gamer.
4. Effective Mental Workout
There’s a lot of scope for imaginative play as young kids, right from LEGOs to dolls to make-believe. However, for teens and tweens, the community may tend to look down on such play. Video games provide them with a chance to resume imaginative play, which is good for the mind.
Unexpected scenarios like the COVID-19 pandemic affected everyone’s mental health – kids and adults alike. Almost everyone resorted to online gaming to retain their sanities as well as to keep their minds engaged. Many consider it to be the equivalent of a mental workout.
We also have some evidence that playing games encourage creative thoughts. In a study, a set of twelve-year-old gamers were asked to draw, make queries, narrate stories, and make predictions. All the kids displayed exuberant levels of curiosity and creativity. So, the psychological benefits of gaming outweigh its drawbacks.
5. Technique To Earn Money Online
Did you know that the 16-year-old winner of the first Fortnite World Cup won $3 million? The other 99 solo finalists took home anywhere from $50,000 to $1.8 million each. While those are some big numbers, gaming conventions and contests are being held worldwide with low-to-medium stakes and decent rewards. Moreover, apps like MPL provide the opportunity to play games and win big.
While the possibilities of becoming a professional gamer are meager, the gaming industry itself is evolving as a whole. It has shown tremendous growth in the last decade, at a rate that rivals the sports and entertainment industries. Moreover, there are plenty of careers brewing in the gaming industry – including reviewing, paid promotions, streaming, marketing, and managing events.
6. Better Social Skills
Some kids (and grown-ups) find it difficult to fit in or make new friends in real life. Playing games online can be a refuge for them to connect with people positively. Many games even offer virtual playdates with real-life friends, which helps add to social skills.
Video games also offer kids something to discuss during recess breaks in school. Nowadays, video gaming is a mainstream conversation-starter among kids, just like movies, music, and sports. An interest in gaming helps kids who have trouble initiating conversations with their peers and build social connections. Parents can also be proud of their kids developing a social circle of their own.
7. Imaginative Boost in Children
Online games possess the potential to bring creativity into our lives. Several great games offer different situations and environments. Sometimes, these situations border on the rationally impossible too. Games push children to consider the existing boundary of possibilities and come up with out-of-the-box solutions to problems. Indirectly, they get better at problem-solving too.
They can come up with a strategy, follow different approaches, and challenge themselves further. Gaming is an activity designed to induce better concentration and focus, relax the mind, and give players a goal to accomplish. All this contributes to a creative boost organically.
8. Manage Emotions Better
Playing games can be both fun and engaging for kids, young people, and parents. However, at times, they can turn out to be frustrating too. It involves paying attention to the screen for long periods with perfect hand-eye coordination.
Games also involve failing in missions or storylines and trying over and over. This offers gamers a better understanding of life itself, that failure is normal and second chances are okay. As young gamers play, they often encounter unpredictable and shocking events in games, such as the demise of a favorite character or a twist in the plot.
For all they know, playing games helps with controlling and managing emotions. It also helps with learning to calm oneself and also, to build resilience.
9. Faster Reading
Studies and research found that kids who play video games are likely to read faster than usual. This applies to even those kids who find it difficult to read, with textual information in the form of instructions to play, steps to complete a mission, or subtitled dialogue in cinematics. Reading faster is also a skill that can add to the child’s learning capability.
Today’s kids enjoy reading from a screen than from a book. Their focus is derived from consuming multi-media content and making decisions with the game’s lead character(s). There’s also a fun element to this, as kids who find it annoying to refer to books actually enjoy looking up an internet website or a forum or watch a YouTube walkthrough to skill themselves. Games, in our opinion, shouldn’t replace books entirely or vice versa.
10. Develop Thinking Skills
Games often ask children to follow certain rules guidelines, ponder their actions, and find solutions to problems. They guide the human brain to develop important thinking skills, such as:
• Attention to detail
• Environmental awareness
• Strategy-making
• Literacy
11. Definitive Source of Entertainment
Online games have become the definitive source of entertainment for parents and kids alike, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic took over. Everyone has likely played at least one online game on their phones since the lockdowns forced us all to be indoors.
Video gaming offers unparalleled fun and entertainment. That rush of adrenaline and the exhilaration of attaining a specific target are a few things that online gaming offers.
12. Teamwork & Collaboration
Several online games require you to collaborate with other players and form teams. People from different backgrounds, attitudes, and personalities interact with each other to get tasks done within the game. This will teach them how to build trust among teammates, often forming a long-lasting bond.
Conclusion
The benefits of playing online games outbalance its shortcomings – whoever has played online games can vouch for that. It can even offer solutions to real-world problems and improve the psychological health of gamers.
As playing online games involves staring into a screen for long periods, it is often perceived as not worth a greater discussion. However, online gaming clearly offers some benefits for youngsters. Games require a certain level of skills and interactions from the player, unlike, for instance, watching television, which is somewhat passive. While addiction to games can pose concerns for parents and teachers, playing games can also positively affect children and young people.
