Video Games For Kids
Testing Your Mind – A GYM for the Brain!
Video Games Where No-one Gets Shot
The popular view of video games seems to be that they involve someone sitting with a controller in their hands, shooting people on a screen.
Of course, this is a simplistic view, and there are several other kinds of video games that are not violent in nature that are a blast to play!. However, the games which fit a common stereotype idea of what are the most popular today… seem to wind up with games that “shoot other people. Many other video games, however, are based around a more considered, statistical way of getting to an end goal… and they certainly don’t fit into ”they rot your brain” idea of what much of gaming entails. Ther are alternatives for Kids who want to stretch and test their minds.
Sports management simulations are very popular. Perhaps the most popular of all is the soccer management game Football Manager. Unlike a great many sports simulations, at no point in this game do you control a player and choose his immediate path to goal. Instead, you take all of the duties of a soccer manager and try to create a winning team. You sign players, you choose tactics, you give motivational team talks and you try to analyse the computer-generated opponent to get the best results.
As this game gets developed and updated at least once a year, new elements are added. It is possible to release a statement designed to play mind games with your opponent before a big match, and players who aren’t getting much time on the field will express their disillusionment with you. It cannot be long before the game develops to a point where you leak stories to the press about players who are annoying you – but there is such a thing as “too realistic”. Hey Kids… remember… Your goal is to learn and to have fun testing your skills.. not to learn to hurt someone!
Hands up if you have heard someone say “those video games are no good – they rot the brain and poison the mind”, or something that approaches that attitude in terms of an emotive response to video games. Now, put your hands back down. Put your hands up if you regularly play video games and have found that the game frustrates you because it poses a problem you cannot work around. Now, do you see the point this article is about to make?
The assertion that video games prevent people from broadening their minds and even work to retard the brain in some way really is an idiotic one. Let’s think about this for a minute. So many of the games out there on the market require the player to really think about what they are doing. Each has a quite logical pattern which can be followed by the gamer to get them to the next level. They very much encourage logical thinking rather than retarding the brain.
Of course, there will be some people who when playing a video game simply run around the (virtual) play area shooting everything that moves and, when they find something that doesn’t move, shooting it until it does. It is a wate of time if your mind is not challenged to solve a problem. Of course, We all need to make choices of how we spend our time with family and friends that we can look back on and say “that was fun!”