Impacts of Online Gaming

Children love playing games. Especially during these pandemic times, children are always playing games online as they are not able to interact and play with their friends outdoors. It may be good and a fun option, but at the same time too much playing of online games has negative impacts too. Some of the negative impacts are mentioned below: 

• Lack of time for other activities

 As children start playing online games, they just want to play more after some time. So, this gives them lesser time for other activities such as studying, spending time with parents, etc. and not able to concentrate on other activities/hobbies, etc. Moreover, such children just get lazy by playing and become a couch potato. 

• Addiction

 One of the worst cases of online games is addiction. People get obsessed with these games that they forget about doing things in real life like playing with friends, spending time with family, doing household chores, etc.

• Aggressive Behavior

 Many children get so influenced by the characters they see in online games that they transform themselves into one of them in reality. So, they tend to enact the aggressive characters, which they see in the online games, to real life and because of which they may inflict self-harm to themselves and to others also. If children start doing this, they must be reprimanded and counseled immediately, otherwise, it might have a serious psychological impact.

• Isolation from society

 The online world is an opportunity to get away from real problems. It acts as a stress buster for many. Children facing many problems in studying or experiencing other personal/psychological issues, immerse themselves in online games to find temporary solace. They feel some sense of artificial freedom through these games. They become so involved in playing that they lose a sense of reality and become isolated from society. This results in the absence of friends, inability to solve real problems, lack of will power to communicate and grow up to be a responsible member of the society. 

• Effects on our health

 Too much screen time can affect our health in many ways such as laziness, eye problems, etc. The position in which we sit in also matters a lot, as children can have their neck starting to cause pain, thus creating innumerable neurological issues in the long run.

• Unsafe

 As we all know, there are a lot of hackers and criminals in the online world as well, especially many online games are unsafe for kids on account of security purposes to some of the advanced problems like cyberbullying, self-harming, cyberstalking to name a few.

Online gaming is good for a limited amount of time as there are some constructive games too which helps in enhancing analytical skills and introducing new skills and technologies, but too much playing might lead to one of the above negative impacts. As everyone must have heard this adage from our elders which is “Too much of anything is poisonous” and this phrase has been etched in our memories for generations.

Also, would like to remind everyone of the quote by Mr. James P. Carse:

“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”   

So be wise, think wise, and grow up to a responsible global citizen. 

Submitted By 

Ishana Rajnish

Class VII-H

DPS GBN