Video games construct important part of children’s daily life. We can observe that many children spend time on playing popular video games after school, like Warcraft, Star Wars and CS. It puts various impacts on children. This blog post will analyze those impacts.
Firstly, video games provide authentic reading experience to children and help them to improve comprehension ability. Children do lots of reading and improve their comprehension of narrative texts, in order to understand contents of video games and play games effectively (Heron-Hruby & Alvermann, 2009). Video games always contain many introductions of scenes and settings of virtual worlds, like outer space in star wars. They also include descriptions to show main features and skills of different characters. For instance, Warcraft describes each main character’s life experience and combat skills, like Jaina Proudmoore. If children want to play a video game, they have to understand those texts accurately. So children’s reading comprehension abilities have improved a lot during the process. Besides, it is a deep experience of reading with real needs. A child usually plays a specific role in a video game and become one part of that story, which makes him or her has a deep understanding of that story and real experience of reading (Beavis, 2012).
（the world view of Warcraft）
Secondly, video games can strengthen children’s ability to use digital technology effectively. Video game is a mixture of language, visual symbols and sounds that created by digital technologies. So children become familiar with digital technologies by playing video games frequently. And children need to analyze interrelations of those symbols, in order to understand the stories shown in video games. During the process of playing video games, children know how to interpret and use multimodal elements of digital media. It is a foundation of using digital technology (Serafini, 2014). For instance, when they heard weird music or sounds, they know characters may meet dangers next in the scenes of video games and begin to observe their screens carefully. Video games also guide children to learn how to use software and digital tools (Serafini, 2014). For instance, children often use on-line tools to discuss with group members in video games. This digital skill will increase children’s competitiveness to get jobs in the future, because a large amount of working places in developed countries use digital tools in 21st century.
(multimodal information in digital world)
Thirdly, video games can help children to understand social rules and promote their socialization. The virtual world inside a video game still has social rules and orders like real society and the plot development of story follows social principles and logics. When children play a video game, they follow those social rules and cooperate with social system in the virtual world. It increases their tendencies to adapt to social rules and structures, which builds solid foundation of socialization in the future. O’Brien and Bauer (2005) find video games shape children’s identities as team member and lead them to do collaborative work. Many video games divide participants to different teams. Each team should create a clear plan together and give suitable tasks to members. They need to communicate with each other and negotiate ideas openly. This is kind of preparation of joining social division of labor in the future.
Although video games have many positive functions, we should notice that there are some negative influences on children’s development. There are some inappropriate information contained in video games that do harm to children’s mental health and behavior management (Engerman, 2016). For instance, some video games use wonderful visual effects to beautify violent actions, so children may think violence is pretty good. And characters in video games choose to solve problems by beating others or killing enemies and get no punishment, which gives children a hint that violence is an effective tool in real society. Other example is some video games use female characters with busty breast and sexy clothes to attract boys. This will bring negative sides to sex education of children.
References
Beavis, C. (2012). Video games in the classroom : developing digital literacies. Practically Primary, 17(1), 17–20.
Engerman, J., & Carr-Chellman, A. (2016). Call of duty for adolescent boys: An ethnographic phenomenology of the experiences within a gaming culture (Doctoral dissertation). Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses database. (AAT 10296976)
Heron-Hruby, A., & Alvermann, D.E. (2009). Implications of adolescents’ popular culture use for school literacy. In K.D. Wood & W.E. Blanton (Eds.), Literacy instruction for adolescents: Research-based practices. (pp. 210–230). New York: Guilford.
O’Brien, D. G., & Bauer, E. B. (2005). New literacies and the institution of old learning. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(1), 120-131. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.40.1.7
Serafini, F. (2014). Reading the visual : an introduction to teaching multimodal literacy . New York: Teachers College Press.7
popular culture 
Thank you for this post! It was an interesting read… After reading your initial argument for the positive impact of video games, I remembered a statement from a State Library librarian. She said that any reading for a child is good reading; whether it be a picture book, a newspaper report, instructions for a game, signs on the roadside or, in this case, video games, where comprehension skills are required to participate successfully. Instead of reading being a task to do each evening, children should be encouraged to read what they want to read. Video games are a great example of this!
Your third argument about the social skills that are developed during gaming is one idea I have never considered, but in reflection definitely makes sense. Opportunities to negotiate and communicate with other game players to solve virtual world problems can offer opportunities to practice 21st Century skills… Especially in an online environment, where many of the students we teach spend many hours in their day already.
As discussed in your final paragraph, violence in games is a huge concern for me. Especially when I hear my primary school students speaking about violent games they play at home. I guess our role as teachers is to develop students’ critical literacy skills so they have the tools they need to make critical judgments about violent games, the motivations of the authors and the impact this has on society (both political and social).
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