As we know, when we get feedback from our employers, teachers or colleagues, it can be very rewarding. We have high scores, the number of bad guys defeated, what world we are on and so on. In other words, a video game can tell us how well we are doing in very short spaces of time. Urgent optimism occurs when video gamers are consistently losing or being beaten at a particular task, they continue to keep playing until they are successful.įinally, video games are made up of immediate and sophisticated feedback systems. This is showing quite a high level of skill and mastery that can lead to what has been termed as ‘urgent optimism’. If you do not form a perfect line, the bricks will pile up and you will lose. In ‘Tetris’ for example, the rules involve placing obscure falling bricks from the top of the screen in order to form a perfect line at the bottom of the screen using control pad buttons. In video games, quite often there are a lot of rules that must be obeyed. Video gamers are able to operate in rule based environments. The ability to reach short term goals has been associated with a sense of achievement and increased self-esteem in hundreds of psychological studies. They are levelling up, beating high scores and defeating ‘bad guys’ all the time. It also means a sense of achievement and using a unique set of learned skills.īut if we look closely at what is happening when a person plays a video game, we can see that the person is constantly reaching short term goals.
![lust for life game lust for life game](https://i.ibb.co/cFbzn9x/Decisions-Of-Life.png)
This means that most video gamers are indeed experts at video gaming. How can this possibly be a good thing? Well according to some psychologists, if you spend 10,000 hours of doing any activity, you start to develop expertise at that activity. Some research has suggested that video gamers are spending approximately 10,000 hours of playing video games before they reach the age of 21. What has been discovered so far, is phenomenal. This led to researchers thinking about how video gaming might actually be good for our wellbeing. However, in recent years, those research studies have been largely discredited for two main reasons: the researchers could not prove what they were finding, and secondly they could not show that video games were the direct cause for these negative outcomes. When video gaming started to become a popular pastime among teenagers, the video game research showed how video gaming was a negative activity promoting aggression, anti-social behaviour, violence and other negative outcomes. Modern day video game researchers have suggested that gaming can be a very worthy investment of time. How can video gaming be a useful time investment? How is video gaming, in any way, good for our wellbeing? These worries among others may lead to some important questions that need to be answered.
![lust for life game lust for life game](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dcj2Y1IW0AAC18a.jpg)
Surely more time spent indoors playing video games and less time spent outside with friends can’t be healthy?.Some worries concerned parents might have include: One of the most popular activities an adolescent or young person engages in is video gaming, and quite often it is considered a worry.