Some people look down on gaming as a hobby; it’s relatively new, popular amongst the young folks (also relative) and comparatively complicated. I say comparatively complicated because the people who bash playing games began to learn to read and write a complicated language below the age of five but somehow can’t run in a straight line on a 2D platform game. Reading is something almost everybody can do without any effort, watching a movie is as simple as sitting back and waiting for it to end but, for somebody unversed in playing video games, interacting can be difficult and stressful.

How an MMO Can Change Your Life

This inability (or flat out refusal to even try to get involved) leads to misunderstanding, misunderstanding leads to hate and, as we all know, hate leads to the dark side. It seems that a week can’t go by without at least a couple of “right-minded” individuals rubbishing video games and getting it totally and utterly wrong. The attitude displayed proves they don’t know what they’re talking about and aren’t even willing to try. Sometimes they’re right – perhaps some games are too violent and that’s having a negative effect when parents don’t care enough to protect their children, perhaps some members of the community don’t know when enough is enough – but with any issue like this there are always two sides and, as usual, both sides are ignoring the other’s points.

Dark side to gaming

There is a dark side to gaming that, being visitors to a website about MMOs, you probably know about. People can enjoy a game too much and it can consume their lives. Whether you want to call this addiction or not isn’t a huge arguing point at this point, but the fact remains that over-indulgence – in anything, not just gaming – can be a terrible thing. That dark side is well documented, especially in the mainstream media, and it tends to get bandied about without any real proof. It’s often not the games fault, but the nature of the person playing. It’s for this reason that, until relatively recently, there hadn’t really been any studies into the benefits of video games.

Ok, so there had been hearsay and theorizing, but no formal support; no tests using Bunsen burners and out-of-fashion glasses; no groups of people pulled off the street comparing product A to product B. It was a hobby for fat, male kids without any chance at social interaction and that meant that there was absolutely no point I actually examining the field as a whole. In more recent years, people have noticed that, actually, there can be benefits to playing video games. I wrote a similar article a couple of months ago when Scott Steinburg released excerpts from his guide for parents worried about video games, but it goes deeper than being beneficial for children, it could help almost anybody.

WoW and its effect on the brain

This week a study was released that proved that playing World of Warcraft for just 14 hours could boost the cognitive ability of older adults if they scored poorly on a previous test. Not only World of Warcraft, but any game in which you have to think critically, socialize and problem-solve. Now, obviously this isn’t as universally beneficial as Steinburg’s defence of a role of gaming within a family, but it’s still a pretty amazing study. In as little as a fortnight, somebody in their seventies could potentially resist the effect of aging on their mind just by playing a little World of Warcraft.

Combat physical issues?

It’s something that’s brought up quite often, actually, when these studies are released. Could gaming have a positive impact on Alzheimer patients? Are there ways to use it to combat physical issues (with the Wii), mental issues, social issues; how can we make these video games not only an enjoyable way of filling our time, but actually beneficial to our health. I can feel almost feel the laughter coming all the way back from the 90s, but its something that people are now seriously looking into.

I read a report in the Daily Mail last week that opticians are now suggesting that a few hours of gaming can even improve the eyesight of people who suffer from poor vision. All the doom and gloom stories about square eyes, brain tumours and seizures that used to fill almost every video game-related article are subsiding and we’re beginning to see the light, perhaps better than if we hadn’t been playing games throughout our childhood. And the eyesight doesn’t just improve a little, the test kids managed to read a whole two lines further down the chart than they were previously able to. If you’ve ever had an eye test and not made it to the bottom of the chart, you know just how impressive that is.

Life better with games

In the case of those people playing World of Warcraft, their lives could be made better by playing the game. The co-author of the paper based upon the study went as far as to say that no improvements were seen in people that scored normally on the cognitive tests, but the important thing in that regard is that there were no negative side effects. Those kids aren’t suddenly going to turn into obese, anti-social losers with a penchant for using homophobic slurs just because they want to play an FPS in their free time instead of listening to hair metal and watching gore movies like their parents did to rebel at the same age. In fact, unlike hair metal and gore movies, there may be advantages to sitting and playing the odd game.

Start talking about the benefits of video games

My friends, we’re on the cusp of actually seeing a form of media go mainstream. Some of us are resisting it - the outcry against casual games is ridiculous – but it will be fascinating to watch. As people stop talking about the downsides of playing video games and start talking about the benefits, the whole thing becomes that much more accepted and is something that probably hasn’t really happened for anything in a long time. Movies and rock music went mainstream long before most people can remember and were instantly accepted by some of the very same people that now want to damn video games off the shelves and into some sort of Beatles/bigger than Jesus-style bonfire.

Entertainment can't be bad

Playing an MMO might not instantly change the way you see the world, not literally or figuratively. If you’re a young person about to embark on the journey of life, there’s probably little more than entertainment that you can get out of booting up an MMO, but there’s nothing wrong with entertainment and, whatever anybody might say, there’s no really bad forms of entertainment – it’s all in the eye of the beholder. And, as the studies continue and we learn more about what happens in our brains as we play, perhaps we’ll learn that, actually, it might be doing some good after all.