The gaming industry is one of the world’s largest industries, with an estimated revenue of 300 billion U.S. dollars that will be generated by 2025. While the statistics provided by Forbes magazine might be unrealistic to the layman, it is a fact that today, gaming is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. As a more significant industry in terms of revenue generated in comparison with Hollywood, it should not be a surprise that many of the world’s proportion of people are linked with gaming. Today, more than ever people are finding gaming as a source of their income either by being a professional player who is signed to an e-sports team, by going into the game development or being a streamer who provides gaming content mixed with their personality to provide entertaining content for people to enjoy for free. Although these streamers stream their content for free, they get a lot of their income through donations in exchange for shout outs or by getting sponsored ads to endorse and communicate the idea of the product to the streamer’s audience. In many cases, streamers who have to build an established name of themselves in particular gaming genres such as the first-person shooters, adventure/story mode game, competitive/battle royal games Et cetera, these streamers get high sums of money as an offer for them to play and review games for game developing companies just as to get their review before launching the game itself. This step is usually made necessary for game development companies as a pivotal part of their launch, which they typically name “prototyping” and final testing. This helps to bring in a lot of revenue for the streamers. At the same time, the game developing companies receive vital information regarding their product to ponder and make corrections. This eventually helps them to deliver a much more compact and concrete game. For such reasons, students, who generally can not perform well in vocabulary tests or any other tests for that matter, are given a choice to pursue such careers if they have developed such interests. This has been the case for many streamers who have made it to the limelight today.
While the reality of the situation might seem compelling, we need to take the issue of excessive gaming pragmatically. It leads to multiple adverse effects on people ranging from teenage to adulthood. Mental and physical health both are lined with the excessive playing of video games as it not only takes your focus away from the real world and takes it into a hypothetical situation. The persistent pressure and need for attention usually lead to burn out, making these players tired completely. Often such players lose their timings when they sleep when they eat what they eat. Excessive gaming also effects how these players talk in general. As it is evident, while gaming gamers need to speak with each other to strategize their next step for which they use short terms and abbreviations, they can get their message across in few words. This has severely affected the 10th grade spelling words these students are meant to learn and prepare for in their exams.
A simple example is that these gamers use the alphabets “AFK” to say, “away from the keyboard.” Using such words day in day out leads to these words becoming a thing of habit which leads to an effect in their studies. Hence, all these reasons combined, we can see a connection as to how excessive gaming can lead to such mental and physical adversaries.
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While the arguments are valid for playing games over an excessive period, the gaming industry shouts that it is the parents’ responsibility to keep an eye on the parents and the caretakers to keep an eye on how long these kids are playing for. The gaming companies themselves, including game and console developers, both argue that their gaming screen and loading screens always have a message against the excessive playing of a video game. Hence these actors themselves deliver the message of how these things can lead to adverse results of such kids. Thus, it becomes the parents’ responsibility to keep a curfew time since these games and console developers can only spread awareness; there is nothing more than they can do apart from spreading awareness. These gaming console always give priorities to educational adverts from companies such as the SpellQuiz.com. These informative adverts are a movement for such companies also to provide educational awareness on their platform to showcase their support towards the importance of education. That student must keep education on the priority no matter what the situation demands.
In conclusion, the truth lies in the fact that there are always two sides to the story, as there are two sides to a coin. As long as the question of whether gaming effects kids’ education or not is concerned, it is up to the parents to decide as they are the ones who control the entire situation.