Gaming has had a pretty bad press in psychology. It is estimated that 97% of 12- to 17-year-olds play video games and that the average teenager spends 7 hours a day on entertainment media, including televisions, phones, PCs and games consoles. Given this degree of multimedia immersion it is not unreasonable to wonder about the potential harm to developing brains.
There is certainly a body of research to support the idea that gaming can have negative effects. Studies of negative effects have largely focused on violent first-person shooter games. Players of violent video games are, for example, up to four times as likely as others to carry a weapon to school, although this does not mean that the gaming directly led to the weapon-carrying. One meta-analysis of research linking aggressive gaming to increased aggression, anger, planned aggression and arousal, and decreases in empathy and prosocial behaviour (Anderson et al. 2010) found significant effects in all these areas.
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