Can Video Games Ever Be Turned into a More Positive Device?

Many parents these days despise video game systems for their kids. They view them as only a reward when their child does something positive. Video games are very negative for a couple different reasons. The first is that there really is no exercise when playing video games, second there are many games out there that are brutal. When I say brutal I mean that the content is just not appropriate for children. Finally video games are not very educational. Kids need to learn and be educated when they are kids. Valuable time is wasted when countless hours are spent playing video games.

Until just recently basically all video games required just as much exercise as sleeping. Maybe a little bit more because you would move your thumbs, but besides that there was no exercise. This limited exercise is obviously a horrible thing especially when you look at the obesity problem in America right now. One of the biggest problems in our children is obesity. Video games promote that obesity with the small amount of exercise that they provide.

Now I said that until recently almost all video games required no exercise. That has changed recently in some video games. The famous system for this change was the Nintendo Wii. This gaming system requires you to make movements with the controller, which are shown on the screen. For example if you were playing a tennis game, you would need to swing the controller as if it were a racquet to hit the ball on the screen. The Wii was not the first ever game to throw a little exercise in the mix, but it is the mostly advanced. There are a few lower quality golfing and other sports games out there, but those games are very limited and almost unheard of.

Another problem with Video games that makes it very hard for parents to want to let their kids play is the content that is in some of these games. Many games these days are all about guns, blood, and gore. Let's face it, that's what sells. The only problem is that many kids have trouble deciphering between what is real and what is fake. All the blood and gore that goes on in some of the video games promotes some of the wrong things for these kids.

Now to stray away from the negatives of video games we need to start to look into the future. Video game systems are going to start to promote more exercise, following the success of the Nintendo Wii. Another thing that really would be a necessity to make video games a more positive device would be the integration of educational games. Many people believe that if video games were made education, the popularity would decrease. Now this would be true if the games were made boring, but if a lot of the popular game play these days was put into an educational game, the child would never know they were learning as they played. A great example would be a good civil war game, but with a little less blood and guts. Children could learn about the Civil War while playing a video game.Video games can be a very hard thing for parents to actually like, and have no problem letting their kids play. With most games now there is very little or no exercise, brutal content, and very little educational quality. With a change in all these categories, we could possibly see a rise in popularity in parents, and a rise in how positive video games can be. They are a great tool for teaching kids, if we harness the potential properly