Video games are a major form of entertainment in the world, as four to five households in the United States own a gaming console. With  the recent release of Call of Duty Black Ops III on November 6th to the release of the highly anticipated Fallout 4 on November 10th, you can only wonder how much video games can help your mental health at the price of slowly degrading your physical health if played for too long in a consecutive run.
Studies show that video games can help raise your mental health. According to an NPR report, in the coming years doctors will start prescribing a daily dose of gaming to help you get better. Gaming can either make you very upset or very happy, when the happiness raises from for instance beating that level that you have been trying over and over for the past few hours or even days it can raise the amount of Dopamine the brain receives instantly causing you to be very happy but of course vice versa for the bad times. When you “rage” or get angry at a video game, it can cause you to propagate the anger. Propagating is when you spread a feeling over multiple things, so when you lose it can cause you to be angry or sad when it comes to other activities outside of the game and can severely hurt your work ethic for the time being. Let’s say you just picked up your prime new copy of Call of Duty Black Ops III and you jump online with your friends to find out that the game’s multiplayer features are broken after you just spent the $60, chances are you’ll be pretty upset right? That feeling can carry on for awhile which could totally trash your school or work ethic if you have either of those after.
Physical Health can also be effected in obvious ways with too much time spent on video games. Take for instance a game that you have just purchased and you’ve read online from the Developers that the game is over 75 hours, like Fallout 4 for an example. If you were to sit on your couch with a bag of doritos for lets say 13 hours a day until you’re unsatisfied with the game you probably will gain some weight which can lead to obesity which is terrible for your mental health. Sight is a physical attribute that video games can entirely ruin or help in ways, studies show that gamers that play first person shooter games can have better eyesight than the average person due to them looking for targets that don’t exist but are very far away in the virtual universe they are in. Some gamers have extraordinary eyesight and some have terrible eyesight from sitting so close to their screens while they play.
Make your own conclusion to this all but no matter what you can’t say that video games don’t have some attributes for helping your mental and physical help at the cost where if taken too many doses you can have some cons that can eventually ruin your physical health or even your mental for a short amount of time.
Game on Ladies and Gentlemen.