For years they told us, living psychologists, parents in panic, commentators convinced that a controller was the antechamber of apathy: video games hurt, ruin the mind, destroy relationships, move you away from real life. As if shooting a monster on a screen it was worse than screaming on the ring road, as if to feel good you need to jogging at the morning.
Instead, look a little, the studies begin to tell the opposite, more and more often. The last one is that of ESA, the Entertainment Software Association, which interviewed over a thousand American veterans. 77% of them say that video games have improved their lives. 85% used them to relax during the service. 78% speak of strengthened morality, 74% of mental and emotional benefits. Not exactly the percentages of a dangerous pastime.
The middle veteran is 37 years old, a degree, children, a full -time job, and plays constantly. He loves consoles more than the PC, shooters more than the puzzle game. He teams up, cooperated, enjoys himself, and maybe (who knows) with me, online, while I insult him because he had fooled the last kilometer. Who knows how many I met in the game, without knowing that they were taking care of something that did not see themselves on the minimap. People who fought to stay standing, and I complain to me because they hadn’t marked the enemy.
Of course, if a boy then regrets himself all day in front of a video game, it is another speech, but probably he would have recounted the same with other: with Tiktok, with the scratch cards and win, with the podcasts of people screaming “raised and invoice”, with motivational videos from spiritual gym, with reality in which he argues for a toast.
And then, let’s face it: I even have a social life, every day I have different, international companions, with some I make friends, people playing from Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Liverpool, and a South African girl from Cape Town who manages casino online yesterday added me on Instagram. We have never talked to each other, but there is mutual esteem and in any case better this that the aperitif with what shows you the stories of the son.
The beauty is that it is not only this study: there are many, more and more. On the positive impact of video games on anxiety, depression, chronic pain, solitude, only that these data affect less, they do not make enough scandal, they do not allow to shout at the alarm, and so we continue to tell the same story: video games hurt.
I, of course, never thought they would save me, neither all the books I read, nor all the books I wrote, however I know what they did for me when everything else seemed off: they kept connected, awake, inside something.
Video games are not bad, they are good, sometimes they do very well. For heaven’s sake, they don’t solve everything. The bills do not pay you (for the successful streamers and YouTubers even those in reality), do not explain your life (better), do not make problems disappear with a quicksave, but they help more than a motivational meeting with slides in Comic Sans.
If someone is still unable, it is only because either it is too old (those who have done the sixty -eight, but to listen to them to be bored to death from teenagers instead of going to the games room), or is Paolo Crepet, or has lost too many games as a child.