Yes: Video games corrode education system’s foundation

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Video games of all sorts are ruining the foundations of our educational system. Nowhere is that more prevalent than at the post-secondary level. From early childhood through pre-teen years and into early adulthood, people who play video games are exposed to something corrosive to education, especially when play is in excess.

While some studies show that video games can be highly beneficial tools, including for educational purposes in classrooms, most games possess little to no educational value.

A senior in college, I have had the ability to watch and observe peers and how they interact with different games and how their demeanor changes based both on the duration of time they play and their performance. I’ve seen a handful of peers devote mass quantities of time to video games that span many genres.

Games on which players tend to most often asphyxiate themselves, it seems to me, are either sports-themed, like Madden NFL or MLB the Show, or first-person shooter games.

First-person shooter games aim to provide a holistic game experience by removing player representations (like avatars) in favor of putting players into first-person perspectives, as Lennart Nacke and Craig A. Lindley argued in a 2008 article for the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden (“Flow and immersion in first-person shooters: measuring the player’s gameplay experience”). Most popular among these types of games are Call of Duty and Halo.

The overzealous use of video games by many of my peers has led to a number of changes in behavior, attitude and overall well-being. College students who spend hours upon hours playing video games tend to do so as a means of escaping the rigors of college life and the stress that accompanies tests, papers, projects and, of course, finals.

When college students first enter school, they find themselves with an overabundance of free time and free will and with no one around to tell them they must study and finish their homework. Some students spend that time that they should be devoting to studies to killing zombies or scoring touchdowns.

A lack of devotion to what should be the task at hand, succeeding in college, can be blamed on a greater devotion to video games, to becoming immersed in their sounds, plots and graphics. Numerous students, including my roommate freshman year, face academic probation and even can be forced to drop out of college after only completing a single year, because of the distraction of video games.

For these reasons, I feel video games are highly detrimental to the foundations of our educational system, and I urge parents of soon-to-be college students to consider not allowing their children to bring video-game systems with them to school or to closely monitor how much time they spend playing video games.

Matthew Ward is a senior at the University of Minnesota Duluth, studying political science and communications. With his eye on law school, he’s captain of UMD’s mock-trial team and is an officer in the Pre-Law Club.

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