Whether you play video games on a portable unit like a PSP, a television or on the Internet,
excessive gaming can affect your personal and professional life. Video game obsession can
be as problematic as gambling and affects people as young as 6 years old. These video
games can have especially bad effects on young children that could become a pattern that
they continue into their early teens and into adult hood.
The amount of time children spend on video games can really affect their lives in many
negative ways. In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey of 2,002 people in the ages of 8 to
18, it showed that young people spend seven hours and 38 minutes using media in a typical
day — up from six hours and 19 minutes a decade earlier. Long hours playing video games
can negatively affect your performance in school or at work if you’re preoccupied with
video games or failing to work at your optimum level because you’re exhausted from a late
night of video game playing. The Mayo Clinic notes that children who devote more than
one or two hours a day to television or video games may have trouble falling asleep, have
problems paying attention and have lower test scores than children who don’t spend as
much time in front of a television or video game console.
The amount of time children take up playing video games largely affects the amount of
time and the quality of work that they can put towards school. Since media and video game
usage is taking up almost a third of a child’s day, the amount of time that they can focus on
homework dramatically drops and causes these children to suffer worse grades than those
students who do not use as many hours playing video games. A 2007 Journal of the
American Medical Association report found adolescents who played video games spent
significantly less time doing homework than those who did not. A recent experimental
study helps address this uncertainty. Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky selected a
group of boys who didn’t own video games (Weis and Cerankosky 2010). Then each boy
was randomly assigned to one of two conditions: either the “video games now” group who
got their systems immediately, or the “video games later” group who didn’t receive their
systems until months later—after the end of the study. Researchers tracked the boys’
academic performance at school. The kids who got their game systems immediately spent
