Assignment 3, Task 1 – Are Games Good For You?

Analysis of video games

Video games are often the source of mass controversy for murders, school shootings and violent behavior. It is believed that playing these games encourages the person to act in these violent ways because the game brings it out. an example of this is Chris Harper-Mercer, (https://www.bustle.com/articles/117705-oregon-gunman-chris-harper-mercer-acted-like-he-was-playing-a-video-game-according-to-survivor-chris)

Who according to a survivor was emotionless as if he was playing a video game throughout the shooting of his college. He was quoted as saying “I’ve been wanting to do this for years”. Chris was known to play many violent video games and gathered support for his plans over 4chan.

After the shooting the blame went towards video games as it is believed that the violence seen inspired his actions.

Likewise , video games have been praised for improving brain functions and claims have been made that it improved memory, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and basic cognitive functions.

In 2013 a study was conducted by Simone Kuhn, a psychologist, which studied the effect of prolonged video game exposure on the brains of younger people. The study required them to play Super Mario 64 for 30mins everyday for the next 2 months. Mario is a platformer game which required you to think about your approach to each level. At the end of the study, and MRI scans he found that the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum  of those studied had all expanded compared to a normal persons.

Source (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/is-video-gaming-bad-for-you-the-science-for-and-against/)

My Conclusion

In my personal biased experience, I play video games a lot. Mainly in the action/fps genre which I have first hand experienced how much games affect someone, since I’ve started playing video games like Counter Strike I’ve noticed a decrease in my reaction times as to be good in the higher levels you have to train yourself and use muscle memory to predict where the next enemy will be and also be prepared to react to any surprises. The player “Hiko” was praised for having “inhuman reactions” due to the amount of training he has had on the game. There are many videos on youtube showing this clip but you can clearly see his reaction time is vastly different to a casual players

I believe that the pros outweigh the cons as people are responsible for their violent behavior and blaming it on video games is just silly as it is an excuse not to take responsibility for your actions.

 

My Game Design Document

My game would be an action game but locked to first person as this means it relies on the users reactions to find enemies instead of third person peaking over walls. There will be the usual stance features, including leaning, prone, crouch and standing. I also like the idea of the enhanced stance system as seen in Arma 3. The game will focus on pve/pvp combat where in there will be AI enemies (zombies) as well as other online players so the players will have to distinguish their targets before shooting to avoid wasting ammo and giving their position away to other players. This will encourage the player to think about their actions and not play like a zombie and shoot everything they see. I believe that when combined with the first person view this will be a good concept for a game that encourages my players to use their brain and think smart to get the advantage on enemies.