First comes Atari, then Nintendo, followed by Gameboy, and its evolving in a fast phase, right

now we have Nintendo Wii Playstation 4, X-box One, and a lot more. Do you know that the video
gaming industry brings in over $25 billion in annual revenue? Playing video games captures o lot of free
time of not just children, but a lot more adults. Surprisingly, recent studies shows that playing video
games can make you smarter.
A lot of people are attacking video games, telling us that it is bad for you. And some research
studies are backing it up. Early research studies showed that playing video games are linked to negative
consequences to the gamer/player. Here are some of the studies:
1.)Playing video games, specifically violent games like the Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row,
Assassins Creed, and a lot more, causes an increase in aggressive cognition, feelings and behaviours to
the players or gamers (Anderson, C.A. 2004). 2.) Other stated that the more time we spend on playing
video games, minimizes our time for physical activities, thus increases the risk of becoming overweight
or obese. 3.) And gamers may also develop some negative physical health problems like carpal tunnel
syndrome, and other repetitive stress injury (Gentile D.A. 2009). 4.) Also some research says that playing
video games leads to poor school performance.
Are the negative consequences the only thing we could get from playing video games? No, there
are a lot of things, good things we could get from playing video games aside from those negative effects.
And one of them is that playing video games makes us smarter. And this is a good reason why we should
play video games.
Playing video games helps us to think critically. Engaging in video games stimulates your brain,
thus encouraging creative ideas or solutions to the adversities you are facing in the games.
Most video games require players to solve problems on the games they are playing. And it makes
video games a good place for us to enhance or improve our problem solving and decision making skills
(Sanders, K. 2012).
We can also enhance our spatial skills, such as mental rotation and visuospatial skills, by playing
video games. Visuospatial ability refers to skills in representing, transforming, generating, and recalling
symbolic, non-linguistic information (Cherney, I. 2008). Visuospatial skills are skills greatly used in
mathematics. Visuospatial skills are needed to have a successful career in the field of science and
technology, engineering and mathematics.
Lastly playing real-time strategic video games, like Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Battle
Realms, and a lot more, can improve our cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is the ability of a
person to adjust and shift between different tasks, and to think about multiple ideas at a given period of
time to solve a certain problem.
All the benefits stated are really beneficial for us, student. We should play video games so that we
may maximize it benefits to our intelligence. To maximize its benefits, we should allocate a portion of our
free time just to play video games, just like Sheldon in the series The Big bang Theory wherein he had
schedule on when to play. Playing video games can also serve as a team building activity for your group
on a certain project. But we should not get to much addicted in playing video games that it causes you to
lose your time for something that is much more important, for example acads. We should always
remember that it also has negative effects to us, so let us play in moderation.
Playing video games can make us smart. When you get home, find time to play video games.