I’ve talked about World of Warcraft here before and I’ve addressed problems from concerned parents about the amount of time their kids spend playing video games versus how much time they spend on physical activities. Today, I want to take this discussion a bit further and I have my own personal reasons for maintaining my level of concern and this concern is something that I am working on here in my own family. My seven-year-old nephew loves to play this game and plays it at his father’s house a great deal.
We can limit his game time when he is with us, but because he spends alternating weekends and will spend at least a month with his father over the summer – we can’t control and monitor his gaming time at all times. Let me emphasize that I don’t think video games are evil or should be banned, but I do think that we as parents need to recognize the inherent dangers and the problems that can be associated with excessive video game play.
Medical Mystery
In Great Britain, a 14-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital because of a blood clot in his leg. In Iowa, a teenage girl suffered a violent seizure and was also rushed to the hospital. On the other side of the world, a 28-year-old South Korean man died from complications related to exhaustion. What do all three of these cases have in common? They were all playing video games.
The 14-year-old British boy sat for 10 hours straight, playing a game with his legs tucked beneath him. He was diagnosed with a condition known as deep vein thrombosis. The teenage girl spent five hours playing another video game and the constant shifting light patterns triggered the seizure. Finally, the South Korean man spent more than 50 hours straight playing a video game and paused only for breaks to toilet and short naps here and there. His collapse was directly related to the level of exhaustion and the strain that put on his heart leading to his death.
While all of these cases are pretty extreme, they highlight a problem that many of us do not always see – it’s not the fault of the games or the game makers – it is the fault of being unable to moderate the response of the players – especially the young from playing the games to extreme. The Chinese government is making a move legislate how much time their people can actually play games and while that may not be a step I want to see our government doing, I do think that our responsibility as parents is to legislate how much time our kids spend playing a video game.
Autonomy & Self Reliance
There are some experts who are currently speculating that the love affair with online role-playing video games such as World of Warcraft, Dark Ages of Camelot and Everquest may be directly related to the need for self-reliance and autonomy that they can’t find outside of this controlled environment. It allows them to be who they want to be, hunting, gathering, achieving and more.
So here’s a piece of advice worth a pound of salt in your considerations. Take a long look at your kid’s gaming habits – look at the games they are playing and develop an understanding for what they are accomplishing in that game. What need is that game fulfilling? You can put controls on how much time they spend playing and you can see if you can help them discover other ways to fulfill those needs that the video game is giving them.
How much time does your child or teenager spend playing video games?
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