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Adam Nelson

Dr. Freeland

ENG 1201

2 May 2021

Why do parents believe video games are a waste of time?

Millions of children around the world have a reason for why they like to game. A lot of

parents believe that video games are just time wasters and a lot of violence, but there are a lot of

lessons children learn from playing certain games. Parents believe video games are a waste of

time because their children could be doing another activity, learning more important skills, and

that their child's behavior is affected by the video games they play. There are other social skills

these children learn from playing video games such as teamwork and competitiveness.

It has been over 50 years since the first video games came out, but that also means half a

century of worried parents. Millions of parents believed that the games their children played

would make them more prone to acting more violent. Since a good amount of games use

violence and other immoral actions, adults especially did not want violence in the real world to

derive from these games. In Parents, Media and Panic through the Years: Kids Those Days,

Karen Leick describes video games and their violence as having an affect on kids. She writes,

“Video games and arcades caused great anxiety among parents starting in the late 1970s… they

took time away from other activities, promoted violence, and were thought to inspire juvenile

delinquency”(67). Leick goes on to say later in her book that certain games such as Grand Theft

Auto V and Call of Duty have also had a tremendous impact on the community(67). Parents see

immorals like this and try to persuade their children into doing other activities.
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Parents of gamers believe that there are better things to do than sit all day and accomplish

nothing. Although multiple people believe that accomplishing things in the game is beneficial for

the kid, adults that live with these children want to spend time with them and have them learn

new things outdoors, play games with the family, and overall be a well rounded person. For Kyle

Giersdorf it is a whole different story. Thousands of kids like Kyle have the opportunity to play

video games professionally, but since there are so many, the odds are very slim that someone

could live off of the money they make. As Leonard Sax says in ‘But Mom, Video Games Are My

Job’, the kids that want to go pro will most likely be let down, he writes, “the odds of your kid

making it into the top 10[of gamers] are less than 1 in 200,000”(1). He later goes on to tell

parents to treat kids that want to go pro like kids that want to go to the NFL. The children have to

be told the cold truth about their future so they don’t waste their time and sleep not doing

homework and staying up playing video games(1-2). This would show why parents believe kids

could be doing other activities because the video games they are playing are not permanent.

At the University of California, Irvine there are scholarships offered to play e-sports. This

is one example of a rare case in college athletics using scholarship money, but there are still rules

for the students that go to school for gaming. Sax asked Mark Deppe, the director of e-sports

programs “If you heard that one of your students was staying up till 5 in the morning playing

video games, missing classes, what would you say?” Deppe answers, “‘That’s what we want to

avoid. We teach time management. We teach mental health. We have a staff member dedicated to

monitoring class attendance, assignments, and grades”( 1). Essentially another reason children do

not have a good excuse to stay up very late on video games except for to have fun. If a gamer

sent to college to be a gamer can not play past a certain time because of school priorities, then
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there is no good excuse a high school student should do the same. Parents believe that, and

would like to see their child engage in other activities to build skills outside of gaming.

Every mother and father wants their child to be successful in the field they enter in when

they grow up. Therefore, having basic social and educational skills is a must for the job they

acquire. Video games engage the child and make them have more fun than learning new skills

from reading and writing. When Joanne Orlando was writing in Curious Kids: Why do adults

think video games are bad? She talked about how some adults believed that their kids weren’t

spending time with “real” people and that they were spending too much time with the animated

characters instead(2). Orlando also wrote that the experts say that there are tons of benefits from

playing certain video games that will indeed help their children in the future. She writes, “One

good thing is the video games that children play today often encourage them to work in teams,

cooperate, and to help each other”(2). Such designs also make it difficult for kids to put the game

down because of the competitiveness and cooperation with their friends. Since it is so difficult

the experts also see the children becoming obsessed with playing and can create concern for the

parents of the household(3). The best way to keep kids from being distracted parents should find

a type of game that you can finish and put down like a puzzle. The kids need to be able to play

and balance their time with their family(4). The type of game they play is the most important part

of keeping them from playing all the time.

Different games make children react differently and fill needs that may not be filled in the

real world. As Kabir Lal writes in his Healthy Gamer, he mentions that children crave challenge

and fulfilment of needs that school does not give them(3). If a child enjoys playing adventure

games they are curious and like new things and new environments, when they play these games
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it fulfills needs they are missing. Other games include being part of a community and working

together to achieve goals that wouldn't be possible individually. If any of the children enjoy

shooter games they are highly competitive and like adrenaline, also having the instinct to

overcome other gamers and wanting to acquire new skills(3). All of these types of games have

made multiple parents frustrated from the amount of time on the console their children are on,

but the effects of gaming are positive to some extent if these social skills are important to the

person playing. The traits can be highly valued in the real world, making the children more

adaptable and suitable for the work environments they will be in when they grow up. On the

other hand it is never the best option to cope with real world problems through video games

because the anger and frustration will build up. The children must learn how to behave outside of

how they feel when their parents take things away or when they are dealing with problems at

school.

Multiple studies have shown that video games do not cause the actual changes in

behavior that parents assume. Rather the parents taking away the console or game is one of the

main reasons that kids get mad, not the other way around. Since kids use these games to cope

with the problems they have, it is always difficult for them to describe their emotion when the

games are taken away. The parents might think that the behavior of their kids is changed by the

games that they are on, but looking back at Kabir Lal’s Healthy Gamer shows different stances

on the emotional effects of gaming to cope with problems. Lal writes, “They do not know how to

deal with sadness, anger, frustration, or fear. Their brains are not developed enough to have the

capacity to deal with these feelings”(4). But rather he adds that they try to avoid those feelings

when they experience negative emotions, and that video games help with the coping
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mechanisms. Some of the aspects Lal writes about lead to negative outcomes for the gamers as

well.As a result of suppressing their feelings and tiring their brains, gaming can lead to

alexithymia, which is the inability to determine your internal emotions(5). All three of the factors

listed can change a child’s behavior, which is why the parents believe that the games must be the

problem. Although some kids actually do get addicted, it usually is just the children not being

able to describe how they feel.

To attempt to answer the question of how kids are affected by the restrictions of their

parents and the consequences of excessive gaming, Andreas Lieberoth and Anne Fiskaali from

Aarhus University did a case-control study. The case-control study was to be used to determine if

children with highly concerned parents would react differently to the tests than other adolescents

the same age. The results of the study proved otherwise that video games did not change any

cognitive parts of the brain, but rather the other adolescents just scored higher on gaming

addiction scales(1). Lieberoth and Fiskaali were trying to tell the reader that the only problems

they found from children without restrictive parents is that they would be more prone to not have

self-control over how much they played. A result of that was the wellbeing of the children being

not well. They state, “wellbeing effects seemed mainly to consist in issues of relaxation and

sleep, and related to gaming addiction indicators of playing to forget real-world problems, and

the feeling of neglecting non-gaming activities”(1). This leads many concerned parents to

question their children’s habits and lifestyles so that their children can be safe from addiction or

overall negative well being.

One of the most difficult tasks for the cognitive effects on children is whether or not they

get addicted to gaming, and if they start to neglect other activities. Most parents would agree that
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the concern for their children is that they want them to be a well-rounded person when they grow

up and that they need to have all the skills for their future. If a child neglects all the other

activities other than video games, and only uses the games to help cope with problems, the child

is most likely needing help. When looking at the results of the study at Aarhus University,

Lieberoth and Fiskaali concluded that addiction to video games is just as bad as addiction to a

drug because they also have a rewarding feeling in the mind(3). They also included in their

studies that some people could be more at risk to become addicted than others: “certain

individuals may be more at risk of developing uncontrollable gaming behaviors.”(3). The parents

of kids that have disorders would most likely end up being more cautious about letting their kids

play video games because they know it would affect them differently. Individual differences are

what makes studies like these difficult, because every child that games has a different situation

going on or a different past that could control how much time they want to spend playing.

How do you know if a child is addicted to video games? Well there are tons of ways a

person is able to evaluate and self-diagnose their child’s addiction habits. When looking at

sections of Kabir Lal’s Healthy Gamer, there is a lot of information on alexithymia, dopamine

exhaustion, and negative emotions children cope with(7).. A lot of the fear these children have is

from not wanting to lose their coping mechanisms. If a child uses video games to hide negative

emotions below the surface, they could burst a valve if they get pushed beyond their limits(8). So

if a parent assumes that their child is behaving badly from playing video games, then the real

reason is because they can’t handle their feelings correctly.

Additionally the dopamine exhaustion does not help either, the excessive gaming of a

certain type of game that needs to be more and more and more. The children that might see the
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parents are going to take away their games may act out and become very defensive since they

might lose the thing that gives them dopamine(8). Overall, making these children look like bad

kids rather than realizing that they are struggling with an addiction and emotional issues that

need to be helped or fixed.

Thinking kids that play violent video games may cause violence or be “bad kids” is not a

new subject. Thousands of people have believed that the reason for multiple different types of

violence and crimes that have happened in the past were caused by people that had an action

packed mind from video games. Starting in the 1990’s with school shootings, a couple popular

people -- one being Jack Thompson -- believed that the video games the shooters played affected

their brains into wanting to kill people. In Parents, Media and Panic through the Years: Kids

Those Days, Karen Leick tells the counter arguments of Jack Thompson and the franchises he

was against. She writes, “Jack Thompson emerged as an anti-video game moral crusader, filing

multiple lawsuits on behalf of victims of gun violence that he argued was caused by the

games”(67). In 1999 the Columbine shootings happened in Littleton, Colorado, supposedly the

shooters played the video game Doom, one of the first person shooter games of the 90’s.

Multiple reporters told the world that they had used Doom to somehow plan their attack and even

said that they treated the shooting like a video game(81).

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Fig. 1. This picture shows what it may look like for a child to be “planning” an attack, or rather

just playing the game they enjoy(‘Video games are my job’1). Leick writes about John Leo, as he

says in his report, “‘With each kill’ … ‘the teens cackled and shouted as though playing one of

the morbid video games they loved.’ And they ended their spree by shooting themselves in the

head, the final act in the game Postal, and, in fact, the only way to end it’”(79). Essentially

adding in that the teens played Doom, and that the only way to end the game in real life was to

kill themselves after the game was over. A very morbid way of thinking of what video games

could do to someone, but a decent rebuttal to people that are for keeping video games.

Columbine was a scapegoat for the big news media. It depicted violence and the tragedy

was covered by multiple stations around the world(80). The media brought credibility to Jack

Thompson from the 90’s to the early 2000’s, and it made him the most visible and vocal critic of
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video games causing violence(80). Another example of a video game being accused as the

problem was when Grand Theft Auto was released in 1997. The 2000’s made life difficult for

Thompson because the GTA game was out and was top-selling in shooter games(81).

Fig. 2. Among all of the shooter games GTA was the top

selling, making millions of dollars(Denu 1).

Thompson was not impressed and called some of these games ‘murder simulators’ and

that GTA was horrible for these children and for violence in America(82). By the early 2010’s

Thompson’s career was fading out because the top-selling GTA V and Call of Duty games were

not going to be shut down or stopped from production since they were making so much money

and were very popular. Leick writes, “In June 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that video games

are protected under the First Amendment, and that… banning the sale of violent video games…

was unconstitutional”(83). After that Thompson had no reason to argue given that he would

never win and would not be able to win a case. Overall showing that video games may use

violence to play the game, but do not actually create physical violence unless the person that
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does it already had another reason to do so. Making all of the claims of violence throughout the

decades of video games irrelevant to the fact it is unconstitutional to take them away.

Since the first video game in the 1970’s, adults that had children have always been

concerned for the wellbeing of their kids. Every mother and father wanted their child to not be

violent when they grew up, but video games are not the reason that happens. There are obvious

negative consequences for playing excessive video games where the brain is exhausted and the

parents want the kids to obey, but the addiction and dopamine kids get from playing games like

GTA V or Call of Duty ends up outweighing the needs of the parents subsequently. The

adolescents don’t realize that their parents believe the things they are accomplishing in the game

is a waste of time in their eyes. Even if the kid wants to be a professional gamer some day, the

parents want them to learn other skills. The social skills they want their kid to have is able to be

gained by playing video games.

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Works Cited

Lal, Kabir. Healthy Gamer. Healthy Gamer. 17 Aug. 2020,

https://www.healthygamer.gg/do-video-games-cause-bad-behavior-in-children/. Accessed

28 Mar. 2021.

Leick, Karen. Parents, Media and Panic through the Years: Kids Those Days, Palgrave

Macmillan, 2019, 67–89.

Lieberoth, Andreas and Fiskaali, Anne. “ Can Worried Parents Predict Effects of Video Games on

Their Children? A Case-Control Study of Cognitive Abilities, Addiction Indicators and

Wellbeing.” Frontiers in Psychology, 15 Jan. 2021,

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586699/full. Accessed 28 Mar.

2021.

Orlando, Joanne. “Curious Kids: Why do adults think video games are bad?” The Conversation,

1 Mar. 2021,

https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-do-adults-think-video-games-are-bad.

Accessed 28 Mar. 2021.

Sax, Leonard. “‘But Mom, Video Games Are My Job.’” The New York Times, 29 Oct. 2019,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/well/family/video-games-adolescents-screen-time.

html. Accessed 28 Mar. 2021.

“‘But Mom, Video Games Are My Job’” The New York Times. Getty Images, 29 Oct. 2019,

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/gamer-boy-royalty-free-image/1052698964.

Accessed 4 Apr. 2021.

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Denu, Zorin. “Got Game?” Flickr. Flickr, 12 May

2011.https://www.flickr.com/photos/zorin-denu/5714445672/in/photolist-9GY2Bo-ara19

1-8miB6X-oVrZWT-ar7gmM-oXJhMr-eajCnR-4XidE-72DM51-aAYLuD-e1rkBb-beug

VF-eaeYmG-73ugX8-52zUMi-72AQVC-eajBQM-atn51g-72ABep-72Arsj-6H57pp-4uQ

Acd-7N2XkP-4uQAmf-fsXW9e-4Xmq2-dsvaG3-cWe7z5-ftdj1Y-61zVu8-fsXXir-c8FRH

A-pferM2-7L8oBQ-pDpyn4-aWTSfH-9cZd1P-o1pamY-pfcqE3-eoUtPD-oXJB8A-pferG

x-oXKfNH-oXKfPK-oXJCfq-QyvJ5S-72J5RG-oXKfxT-pdcvEu-pfeqEc. Accessed 4

Apr. 2021.