If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!
Page history
last edited
by PBworks16 years, 10 months ago
! Effects of New Technology and Video Games on Teenagers
Effects of New Technology and Video Games on Teenagers
What is our message?
The positive and negative effects of video games and new technology on people.
What will our documentary do to present our message?
We will film kids playing video games and using new technology and we are also going to have interviews and we are going to put our opinions so it is going to be subjective.
What else do we need to make the documentary?
We are also going to put some humor on the interviews and we are going to put the names of the people we are interviewing so you can know who is talking. We can also put images of people playing and using other things related to technology and some cool facts.
John
I don't quite think that this is in my category, but I've found an awesome video that is perfectly relevant. The only problem is that it was made and is owned by someone else.
That's the link so that you can look it over and decide if you want it in the final product. If you can find out who owns it and get the consent for us to use it (unedited) with a source cited at the end of our presentation.
Technology. How would we live without it? Have you ever thought about it? No, you simply say: it has only bad things and it only takes away our time. Is that true? No, studies in universities and hospitals show that technology and video games have more good effects on people than bad effects. Imagine yourself at midnight in a library and you find what you are looking for. With technology, simply turn on your PC, go into internet, into Google and type what your looking for and you'll find out much more than you were looking for. Video games have a similar effect. I read about it in an article called "Dream Machines" by Will Wright, producer of many famous games such as The Sims, at a page called Wired.
The human imagination is an amazing thing. As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games.
Will Wright wrote this great words summarizing what he wrote in the article. When a kid receives a video game they don't read the manual, they simply play the game and understand it with the mistakes they make. When a child plays a video game his or her memory become better, they never forget how to play the game. Children take video games as a new form of learning and they learn how to become creative, how to take decisions, such as what way to choose. People take the world as a place for creativity.
People who have never played a video game only say that video games are bad because they take away children's time and they teach bad things, but if they had played they would notice the contrary, the positive aspects of video games such as creativity, community, self-esteem, problem-solving, agility, and self-confidence. Video games also make children have more imagination. For instance, today you ask a child to do a story about heroes and they will possibly do it with their favorite video game characters and new characters that were made by the child because of the video game's effect on the child's imagination.
If you have never thought about this, think about how some technologies helping our bodies. For example, cars help our legs and reaction, TV our senses, and video games our agility and hand-mind coordination.
With the graphics of video games, video gamers and each time feeling closer to the place on the TV. For example, you play a game in which you are in an African city and you need to escape from a war. You would get to know how these people live and how is the place in which they live. The majority of the people say that action and shooting games are the worst. Really, when children play a game of the World War II they will learn about what made the war start, who won, and the names of the famous people.
Video games are also a way to express ourselves. In many games you can create a character and make it how you want. Just like music, you can reflect your lifestyle with what games you have and which ones are the ones you play the most.
I think that technology is have much more good effects than bad effects. For me, I think video games are cool and I have learned a lot thhrough them. Video games are becoming a lifestyle.
DEPRESSED
Despite the presence of fire engines and SCDF officers preparing an inflatable mattress below, Michael seemed oblivious to what was happening. Thankfully, his father had a key to his bedroom. After coordinating with the rescue teams on the floor above and below, the officers rushed in and pulled Michael to safety. Michael was taken to the police station, and later admitted into the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), after it was learnt that he had sat on the window ledge on two other occasions
He told The New Paper on Sunday: 'I never thought of killing myself, I was just very depressed and I wanted to sit there till morning,
But that was little comfort for his parents.
Mr. Wong said: 'His legs were hanging outside; it's so dangerous. What if he had dozed off? He could have fallen.
The incident marked the climax of the family's struggle with Michael's mental illness, which started in 2004 when he was in Secondary 2.
Back then, he would become violent if his parents tried to stop him from playing computer games,
He would lock himself in his room and pull down everything from his shelves and cabinets, and use a pen to scrawl on the walls and ceiling.
Michael started playing computer games in Primary 4,
But it was when he entered secondary school that he became obsessed with violent games like Guild Wars, Counterstrike and Diablo.
Micah: a prime example of the depression video games can cause can be found at this website
STRANGE NOISES
Every day, he would start playing as soon as he got home from school, and stopped only when his parents got home about five hours later. The computer is in their room.
He seldom went out on weekends, preferring to play games at home.
On the few occasions he did leave home, he would go to LAN gaming shops.
When he was 14, he started hearing voices and strange noises around him.
'I heard people following me. It made me paranoid. I heard clicking noises, like someone was activating a camera. I could hear them only at home, and not outside,' said Michael.
He became convinced that his neighbors upstairs were spying on him, and he even asked his parents to move.
Mr. Wong said: 'We took him upstairs when he insisted, but he didn't believe what we or the neighbors had to say.'
Michael became so paranoid that he carried an umbrella around at home as he was afraid someone would attack him.
'Sometimes I couldn't sleep, because it was so noisy upstairs,' he said.
He became reluctant to leave the house.
He couldn't take the bus or MRT, because he said there were too many people he didn't know.
He became easily agitated, and lost his temper frequently at his parents and his 22-year-old sister.
He was obsessed with his appearance as well.
His mother, 44, said: 'If there was one pimple on his face, he would see 10 pimples and keep saying he's ugly.'
Soon, his grades plummeted, and he was moved from the Express to the Normal stream in Secondary 3.
Worried, his parents took him to see an ear, nose and throat specialist and a psychiatrist.
He was given medication, but while these suppressed the voices, he became increasingly agitated.
He got so angry that once he yanked at the window grilles until they came off.
After the incident in March, Michael stopped going to school and he was warded in IMH another three times after his parents called the police, afraid that he would turn violent after locking himself in his room on various occasions.
Michael was put on new medication, but it made his body very stiff and his face mask-like. He also became restless.
(Daniel T.)
In recent years, the video gaming industry has grown a lot and it is having a very strong influence on people. The target buyers for the people who make video games are children. The video gaming industries are studying what makes children play video games. I found interesting information in a PBS page and it was an article called Reality Bytes: Eight Myths about Video Games Debunked and it was written by Henry Jerkins a MIT professor. The article talks about what influences teenagers to play video games and how it can affect their social and family life. The article also talks about the effect video games have on children and teenagers but I already talked about that on the last post I wrote.
Some things that make children and teenagers play video games are stress from school, depression, being bored, and pressure from friends and families. Teenagers also play video games to pass time and to become creative for something because video games stimulate the creativity of children and teenagers. When teenagers are starting to have problems at school such as homework, they start having stress. Some teenagers think that playing video games takes away their stress but it only takes it away while they are playing. Also, many times when children are sad or bored and they have nothing to do they play video games. If the children always play video games when they are bored they get used to play them at all times. Another reason for children to play video games is that sometimes friends have a videogame and they show it to you and to other people just for you to feel jealous. Because of this the teenagers and children feel pressure of buying the videogame so they don’t feel bad. Also children play lots of video games because they like to play them with their friends. When children go to their friend's houses and play video games, they usually like the games so they buy them. Some publicity that video games producers use is that they use some children playing video games and with their faces they are "saying" buy this video game or you are stupid or something like that.
The military uses some video games of shooting to train soldiers to kill and some military psychologists say that the video games children plays have the same impact on them. Some times games can make children brutal and more aggressive. When the children know that the military uses video games they buy them just to feel like if they were in the military.
Some psychologists think that video games can be really good to children in many positive ways. Henry Jerkins wrote this very useful paragraph about positive things video games have:
"The military uses games as part of a specific curriculum, with clearly defined goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and have a need for the information being transmitted. There are consequences for not mastering those skills. That being said, a growing body of research does suggest that games can enhance learning. In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, James Gee describes game players as active problem solvers who do not see mistakes as errors, but as opportunities for improvement. Players search for newer, better solutions to problems and challenges, he says. And they are encouraged to constantly form and test hypotheses. This research points to a fundamentally different model of how and what players learn from games".
I think that video games can be very fun but when you play them too much it can get really boring. Sometimes I play video games because I am bored but never because of some reasons that Henry Jerkins talks about in the article I read.
In my next post I will like to write about some problems that video games can generate in adult's lives.
(Daniel T.)
Video Games and the problems they create
I was searching some information of the impact of video games on teens and I found this page that has a lot of information. The page talks about some studies that universities and hospitals have done. The general result shows that when teens play bloody and violent they can behave like if they were that person in the game. Many children reveal to their parents and teachers if they say that video games are bad because they are vicious about them. But not all the video games are bad for people, the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) shows that some games help people with computer reading, solving problems, and motricity. The ESRB rates video games according to their content. The rating method is: Early childhood (3 and more years), everyone (6 and more years), teen (13 and more), mature (17 and older), and adults only (18 and older depending on where the game is sold). One of the major causes of increasing teen violence is that there are more violent games and more children allowed playing them a lot. More studies about the subject have said that boys play more videogames weekly than girls. The author of the article said:
oVideo games also encourage players to identify with and role play their favorite characters. This is referred to as a "first-person" video game (Anderson & Dill, 2000, p. 788) because players are able to make decisions affecting the actions of the character they are imitating. After a limited amount of time playing a violent video game, a player can "automatically prime aggressive thoughts" (Bushman & Anderson, 2002, p. 1680). The researchers concluded that players who had prior experience playing violent video games responded with an increased level of aggression when they encountered confrontation (Bushman & Anderson, 2002).I think that parents should never take away their children's video games because it will cause the child to become very sad, and they will be very bored. I also think that there is a good part of video games that can be better than the worst parts. The games can bring motricity to children and use of technology in their lives and that is important in these days in which to get a good work it is very useful to have a good control over technology and not the tech controls you. I think that not all games are bad. Some games have other languages or mathematics or something like that that the children can learn at school and playing the game.I would like to learn about what things can influence children and teenagers to play video games.
The worst part of the violence in video games is that sometimes the children stay violent forever. It is easier that small children are influenced from this violent than teenagers or adults. The children of today can become violent by watching their older brothers and sisters play violent video games that are not proper for small children. Some times the industries that make video games make campaigns to promote their video games, and many children see that and they would like to have them.
When children and teens have video games and they play them a lot, it will be very difficult to take the video games away from them. This are some tips for parents worried about their children playing too much video games or not proper games for them:
Know what is the game about and if it can affect your children.
Watch your children playing the game and think if it is good for your son or daughter.
Talk with other parents to talk about video games.
(Daniel T.)
I've been thinking of the topic I would choose on my Teen Life Project, and my first issue to choose is technology. I found an article called "Technology Gives Teens Myriad Ways to Torment" and it talks about how technology can cause stress for teens. The major topic of this article is how technology takes away time from teens and how it makes them stress. It talks a lot about internet bulling and how sometimes teens give their personal information on internet. The major cause for internet bulling is that some persons can’t solve their problems in real person so they do it on the internet.
"People are too wussie to stand up to the person in real life, so they decide to
Go on the computer and send mean, nasty messages," said Colleen Harris, 16, who
Said she has been the target of an online assault. "They're trying to be mean
And vicious, but they're ignorant. ... When they were calling me names, it
Didn’t faze me at all, but I could see how other kids could be hurt by it."
This is what Maria Elena Baca, the writer of the article said about internet bulling. The police can't do a thing about this problem because it is illegal to prevent teenagers from expressing their selves. Many studies have said that 7% of children who use the internet have been targets of internet bulling and many have received rude comments or messages. Many universities and organizations have been creating anti cyber bulling programs. Most of these programs teach teenagers how to prevent cyber bulling to occur to stop the problem. The worst part is that the majority of the bullies are teenagers because many adults don't know how to use internet. There have been cases in which bullies put comments on web pages that say that some one uses drugs or something like that. Some of the affected people of the problem go on with their lives, but many don't. A student in Canada had to leave school because o the offends his classmates caused him on a web page that said he consumed drugs and that he was in groups of robbers. The older teenagers have been able to solve the problem and they only laugh about it, but the youngest ones have been stressed and scared. Many of these teenagers do not report their problem so it becomes greater each time they go into the red. Many of the times cyber bulling is only a joke but it can end really bad, like the boy in Canada who had to leave the school.
I really think that cyber bulling is a big problem that can affect student's lives at schools and in their houses. I think that children should make some things to stop the problem, those things are:
Teach teens how to block bad messages.
Don't respond to bad messages they send you.
Never reveal personal information.
If you are going to share your password make sure you only share it with your parents. I think that all the teen angers should be aware of cyber bulling. Always be aware of bad messages you see on the internet and always say no if some one asks you for personal information and never chat with unknown people.
Internet bulling can cause children and teenagers have more time being on internet and less time doing homework.
I'm interesting in finding out how can video games affect teenagers life at school and at home.
John S in Virginia (post-production)
I think that some people take it overboard and confuse reality with the video game fantasy. Teens should have to know the difference before they play these violent video games. My opinion is that for me, the violent video games or the even the puzzle games relieve my stress built up from my day and leave me refreshed. I have these very violent games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, Black, and F.E.A.R. I am confronted every day yet I have been in only one fight because the other kid got really mad at me. There's a fine line you must walk, you can slaughter, hijack, and everything else in the games. But you have to realize that when the power flips off it all has to stop until the power is back on and you're in the game world. I found two pretty relevant sites that are packed with information. They're kind of long but they have other links at the bottom for further research.
My topics for the Teen Life Project are things related to technology. Technology has many things but I wanted to get started with the internet. In Goggle I put “effects of technology on teens,” and saw some articles about technology on teens. As I read I understand that school is the place were more teenagers use the internet. Read the copy and paste to see the statistics.
"The most recent Pew Internet Project survey finds that 87% of all youth between
The ages of 12 and 17 use the internet. That translates into about 21 million
People. Of those 21 million online teens, 78% (or about 16 million students) say
They use the internet at school. Put another way, this means that 68% of all
teenagers have used the internet at school."
I learned so many teenagers are using the internet at school to do homework, reports, projects, e.g. But many kids are doing copy and paste in their homework and the teachers in their schools are getting programs to find out if a kid is cheating or not. In my school if a teacher finds out if you are doing copy and paste you would received a suspension and a zero percent on your project or home work. But I believe that in schools that have low resources don’t have does programs to detect plagiarism. Other thing that I figured out on the internet is that many kids are using internet to see inappropriate contents like pornography, violence or other things that aren’t appropriate for their age. I also learned that kids are staying more time at their house in the computer chatting in messenger or hearing music for a very long time than knowing what is happening in the outside world or playing outside with their friends.
I think that technology has good and bad effects on teenagers all around the world. Some good effects are that it is a good source of information and you can use it to do projects, home works, or other things. I also think that people should not use internet to see inappropriate content because many statistics say that in the last years the average of teenagers using the internet for this bad things that are not for their age. Teenagers are also using the internet to see videos of violence or terrorism. Some videos such as tortures that show many blood and crazy people that do not think in others than him. I also think that spending many times in the computer can damage your vision and you would need to use eyeglasses or contact lenses.
Now that I already kind of finish my first part of my Teen Life Project topic with is technology, I am going to search about other things related to it such as ipods, cell phones, television, and other things. I hope that for the next part of this project I would found the right and much information about my topic. I would try to put information like how does ipods affect teens or how television affects them.
Mr. Hide I didn’t link to other pages because I didn’t remember how to do it.
(Juan Manuel)
(Video Games) Second part of technology
My next step of my topic which is technology and the things related to it is to do my post about the impact of video games on children. I entered google and I put "children, “then it appeared several links and I put “Video games and children." This topic is related to technology so I wanted to know how this topic affects teenagers. Read the copy and paste to see some effects of video games.
“Some research suggests that playing video games may affect some children's
Physical functioning. Effects range from triggering epileptic seizures to
However, are transient or limited to a small number of players. Research has
also identified benefits associated with creative and prosocial uses of video
Games, as in physical rehabilitation and oncology (Funk, 1993). Proponents
of video games suggest that they may be a friendly way of introducing children
to computers, and may increase children's hand-eye coordination and attention to
detail.”
In this page I learned that the rate of playing video games and watching television has doubled because following the statistics in 1967 the average of six-graders watching television per day was of 2.8 hours. And in the statistics of 1983 the average of six-graders was of 4.7 hours per day without counting the time they spent playing video games. This increase of rate can affect the children in health because maybe it can cause eye problems or problems to sleep because every body knows that sleeping has a huge influence in a kid’s growth.
Years ago seventh and eighth-graders had the chance to vote for their favorite video game category. The most voted category was of fantasy and violence which occupied 32% in the statistics. I also sawthat that the second favorite category was of sports and other kinds of stuff that contained some violence. And this category occupied 29% in the statistics. The other 39% percent was divided into three categories, general entertainment theme, human violence, and educational content. I also learned that there are more males that play video games than females.
I think that the rate of kids watching television and playing video games has increased because in the 1967 not so many people had a television so the one that had didn’t saw so much T.V because it did not have so many channels and sometimes the T.V didn’t worked. So when they made the voting in 1983 more people had more televisions at home and it worked better because of the advances of technology. I think that fantasy and violence was the favorite category of video games because when these kids were little maybe their parents saw with them Power Rangers or other T.V shows that contained guns and other stuff.
I also think that games with violence are the favorites of the children because they are full of entertainment and kids want to do all the things that appear in the movies and the television shows. Maybe the video games of sports are the second most favorite category because the children want to try to do the magic things that Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Messi, Maradona, and other awesome soccer players do with the ball. I think that boys play more video games than girls because they are more interested in guns and cars.
Well, I already finished another part of my Teen Life Project topic which are “The Effects of Video Games and Technology on Teenagers.” Now I a going to look or search about how does vide games affect children’s health and how does other technological advances affect teens in other ways.
Juan Manuel
How do Video Games Affect Kid's Vision?
My next step of my International Teen Life Project is to put how does video games affect kid's health. I decided to do this post about that because I already wrote of video games and I wanted to do one of health. I also wanted to know how action video games affected the percent of a kid’s vision. Here is my copy and paste paragraph.
"Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played
action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by
about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a
visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics."
In this page I learned that playing action video games can make changes in how our brain process visual information. Some times it can make you see symbols more clearly with one eye, even though that the symbols are very closer. These improvements are made when there is a substantial raise in the spatial motion of their vision. But these improvements can be notice after just 30 hours of playing.
One day Daphne Bavelier, a science professor, made a test with students from college. She divided the students into two groups. One of them was the experimental group and the other was the control group. In this test both groups needed to play a video game for one hour and then they needed to distinguish a “T” that was hidden with rare symbols. The experimental group played a game called “Unreal Tournament,” an action game, and the control group played “Tetris,” a game visually less complex. After one hour the experimental group could distinguish the “T,” but the control couldn’t. Action video games can make good and bad things to your vision. The good ones are the ones from the test that I just wrote, and the bad ones are that if you are playing the game very close to the television, the light that produce the game can give eye problems and you will need to use glasses or contact lenses.
I think that the parents should know what games they should buy to their children how many hours they should play on the day. Not only if in a test they show that if you play video games it will improve your ability to distinguish objects, you need to play a lot of video games. I have some recommendations for the parents:
You should let your kid play video games, but if you see him playing a lot you should stop him.
If you buy him an action game you should be aware if your kid is far away from the T.V because it produces a lot of light that can be harmful for their eyes.
I think that amount of hours that a kid should play in a day is 1 hour in a school day and 2 hours in the weekends. That is because in the school days a kid has more responsibilities.
Now I am interested in doing my new post on what are the effects of new technology like ipods, computers, cell phones, and other things that have to do with technology, on teenagers. Another thing that I would like to do is that since many teens use the computer I can make my new post on cyber-bulling.
Playing video games helps introduce children to computer technology
Lets children practice following directions
Some games help practice problem solving and logic
Video games help to improve motor skills and spatial skills(The ability to locate objects in three dimensional world using sight or touch)
Games can give an opportunity for parents to play with their children
Information technology is introduced to players
Some games have therapeutic applications with patients for example their was this show on the discovery channel about how this guy created a video game to have people get over their phobias
Games are entertaining and fun
*
Negatives
Over dependence on video games can cause players to lose a social life because many video games are one player
Violent video games can cause more aggressive behavior then watching violent acts on the TV.
Women are put in as weaker characters and are helpless
Environments in games are often based on violence, or aggression
Most games (like grand theft auto) are only based on weapons, killings, kicking, stabbing, and shooting
Many games do not require independent thought or creativity
In most violent games, the player must be more violent then normal to win. And in some Games players are more affected because the violence is being seen through the eyes of their character
Most players will spend their time playing video games instead of doing their academic work
Reasons children give for playing video games
It’s fun
Releases tension
Relieves boredom
Develops gaming skills
Like to feel in controls
Facts about video games
In 2005 video game market in the U.S. reached almost 10.5 billion dollars in sales
The world wide market is expected to grow to 46.5 billion dollars by 2010
A report showed that 45 percent of heavy video gamers and almost 1/3 of avid gamers are from the ages 6-17
The FTC said that 69 percent of unaccompanied 13-16 year olds could purchase M rated video games from retailers
A study of 2000 8-18 year olds found that 83 percent had a gamer in their house, 31 percent had 3 and more gamers at their house , and 49 percent had a video game counsel in their bedroom
Bottom line
Many games can be fun
Violent video games can be linked to aggressive behavior
they can cause gamers to spend most of their time playing instead of doing their academics
having a game counsel can result in having someone such as my brother to play video games and over look their academics
parents need to limit gaming time**
*
Azita
Hi, this is the poem that I made for this problem
Together playing video games
Fun to watch
Play and win
Passing levels
Like its wind
Blowing fast
Then slowing down
Getting stuck
At a wall
Getting smarter
Finding ways
Cracks and holes
To seep through
Faster
Faster
As I go
At the end
What a go
Smart
Witty
Now I am
But darkness lies
Within these hands
Games for me and only me
Bringing hatred
Wide bloodshot eyes
Worried about spies
Blue glare across my skin
Violence seeping in
Guns, knives
Killing too
Guess its game over
For all of you
Joo Keng
Hi, I have also made a poem about video games. Please include Azita's and my poem in the video that you are making. Thanks.
A 12 year old boy
Living normal life
Nothing much to do in his living days
He stumbled upon a game
Soon, he jumped into fantasy
Forgot reality
Shadowed by his virtual identity
He found much success in this little world of his
Overjoyed by the recent rewards
Finally, he realized that it was only a virtual victory
Post -Production
By: Micah and John
Any questions, comments, or requests post here and we'll get to them ASAP
MATERIAL
The 21-year-old Hudson man was addicted to EverQuest, says his mother, Elizabeth Woolley of Osceola. He sacrificed everything so he could play for hours, ignoring his family, quitting his job and losing himself in a 3-D virtual world where more than 400,000 people worldwide adventure in a never-ending fantasy.
On Thanksgiving morning last year, Shawn Woolley shot himself to death at his apartment in Hudson. His mother blames the game for her son's suicide. She is angry that Sony Online Entertainment, which owns EverQuest, won't give her the answers she desires. She has hired an attorney who plans to sue the company in an effort to get warning labels put on the games.
"It's like any other addiction," Elizabeth Woolley said last week. "Either you die, go insane or you quit. My son died.
Every day, he would start playing as soon as he got home from school, and stopped only when his parents got home about five hours later. The computer is in their room.
He seldom went out on weekends, preferring to play games at home.
On the few occasions he did leave home, he would go to LAN gaming shops.
When he was 14, he started hearing voices and strange noises around him.
'I heard people following me. It made me paranoid. I heard clicking noises, like someone was activating a camera. I could hear them only at home, and not outside,' said Michael.
He became convinced that his neighbors upstairs were spying on him, and he even asked his parents to move.
Mr. Wong said: 'We took him upstairs when he insisted, but he didn't believe what we or the neighbors had to say.'
Michael became so paranoid that he carried an umbrella around at home as he was afraid someone would attack him.
'Sometimes I couldn't sleep, because it was so noisy upstairs,' he said.
He became reluctant to leave the house.
He couldn't take the bus or MRT, because he said there were too many people he didn't know.
He became easily agitated, and lost his temper frequently at his parents and his 22-year-old sister.
He was obsessed with his appearance as well.
His mother, 44, said: 'If there was one pimple on his face, he would see 10 pimples and keep saying he's ugly.'
Soon, his grades plummeted, and he was moved from the Express to the Normal stream in Secondary 3.
Worried, his parents took him to see an ear, nose and throat specialist and a psychiatrist.
He was given medication, but while these suppressed the voices, he became increasingly agitated.
He got so angry that once he yanked at the window grilles until they came off.
After the incident in March, Michael stopped going to school and he was warded in IMH another three times after his parents called the police, afraid that he would turn violent after locking himself in his room on various occasions.
Michael was put on new medication, but it made his body very stiff and his face mask-like. He also became restless.
Bullying is no longer the domain of the biggest or strongest. In a world of text messaging, picture phones and social networking Web sites, the keypad can be mightier than the fist. Name-calling. Vicious rumor-mongering. Threats of violence. The harassment can spread and persevere online and be printed and passed around.
"People are too wussie to stand up to the person in real life, so they decide to go on the computer and send mean, nasty messages," said Colleen Harris, 16, who said she has been the target of an online assault. "They're trying to be mean and vicious, but they're ignorant. ... When they were calling me names, it didn't faze me at all, but I could see how other kids could be hurt by it."
School officials say the problem is growing, and that it's difficult to prevent or police because they can't restrict student speech and laws and legal precedents are murky.
Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson recently announced a plan that would add cyber teeth to a 2005 law requiring school districts to adopt written antibullying policies, would redefine harassment to include one-time online attacks and redefine identity theft to include cases that don't involve financial transactions.
Swanson noted that parents had approached her on the campaign trail with stories about their children being bullied online. "Technology has really exacerbated traditional bullying," she said. "People just need to be more sensitive that cyberbullying is occurring, and occurring every day in a very real fashion. And when it occurs, it creates havoc in people's lives."
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire researcher Justin Patchin has gathered chilling examples of such attacks. A girl, 13, badgered via text message for details about her body. A teen outed as bisexual by Internet bullies and told he was going to hell. A boy, 15, taunted about his ethnic background and threatened that he would be assaulted.
In a national survey done last spring by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, 9 percent of 1,500 kids ages 10-17 reported being targets of online harassment; 28 percent reported making "rude or nasty comments to someone on the Internet." The study also found that kids who are targets of cyberbullies are three times more likely than non-victims to target others.
Michele Ybarra, president of Internet Solutions for Kids, a California-based advocacy group, collaborated on the study and wrote about the findings in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics.
"It's important to acknowledge and understand and learn about how kids may be interacting on the Internet, both in similar ways and different ways from the traditional world," she said. "We don't know yet if Internet harassment is more or less upsetting to kids; for some adults, it's more scary because they don't understand the Internet."
Cathy Stahl and Deborah Istre, senior health promotion specialists for Hennepin County, Minn., coordinate an antibullying program that's been adopted by more than a dozen suburban middle schools. Cyberbullying is one aspect of the program, created at the University of Bergen in Norway. The program requires schools to take a preventive stand against bullying, then, as incidents occur, to work with the perpetrator and victim to prevent the behavior from recurring. The county has taken on the project in part as a crime prevention tool.
"In the past, as adults, we would view bullying as normal kid behavior, something that kids grow out of, (that) targets just need to toughen up and deal with, and the behavior will pass," said Stahl.
As a prevention specialist and peer mediation adviser, Celeste Gorman often works with kids who have become embroiled in online disputes.
"With any perpetrator of bullying, there's a need for power that doesn't necessarily mean physical power," she said. "Information becomes money to them. The kid who knows all the gossip has the power. Nobody messes with that person."
Most students eventually are able to move on. Some aren't so lucky. David Knight of Burlington, Ontario, left school to finish his senior year at home after bullies dedicated a Web site to trashing him, including spreading rumors that he used a date rape drug to molest young boys.
The December issue of Seventeen magazine contained a profile of a 15-year-old Florida boy who committed suicide in 2005 after a cyberbully spread rumors that he was gay. A Vermont teen also committed suicide in 2003 after months of incessant harassment, including instant message exchanges with another teen who encouraged him to take his own life.
Reaction sometimes depends on the teen's self-esteem and resilience. The New Hampshire study found that 39 percent of kids who are harassed reported feeling distressed by it. Younger teens tended to be much more traumatized. Certain triggers increased the stress, including aggressive offline contact: phone calls, visits to the victim's home and unwanted gifts.
"We're talking about a really small subset of kids who report this stuff," Ybarra said. "It's not surprising that it is associated with a greater likelihood of being distressed, and it's more creepy if you don't know the person, or if you only know them online and somebody shows up at your doorstep."
Many teens say that online bullying isn't on their parents' radar.
Carolynne Hahn, 16, a sophomore at Avalon School in St. Paul, recently completed a multimedia project on cyberbullying and "mean girls" who gossip, exclude and destroy other girls' reputations. She has seen a few of her friends land at the center of a cyber battle.
"Parents don't know their kids have a MySpace (page), and if they do, they don't monitor it," she said.
The New Hampshire study found that 67 percent of kids who were harassed told someone: a friend or sibling (45 percent) or a parent (31 percent). Of those who didn't tell, they found, 63 percent said the incident wasn't serious enough, and 14 percent thought they'd get in trouble. Patchin, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, has collected about 6,000 teens' anecdotes about bullying on the Web. Of those, 40 percent told nobody; only 14 percent reported telling an adult.
"Kids don't want to talk to their parents because they don't want their computer privileges revoked," he said.
Revoking computer access is a mistake, he said, because kids need to be computer-literate to succeed. Instead, parents should offer guidance and scrutiny to help prevent kids from becoming bullies or victims.
"Just like you want to know where your kids are and who they're with after school, you should ask them where they go online, who they hang out with online," Ybarra said.
Asked whether more parental supervision could prevent Internet bullying, Colleen Harris was skeptical. "No amount of parent intervention will make rumors stop."
In the past 30 years, video games have had a major impact on how people spend their leisure time. The first generation of video games were nothing more than simple geometric shapes, one or more of which could be controlled by the game player. Each generation of games always uses the newest technologies available, leading to more impressive graphics and realism. Along with these new technologies come more realistic violent acts and situations. Also with each new generation of video games, people are spending more time and money on them. In this article the term video games will be used to define any interactive multimedia in which the human game player has control over the main "character" in a simulated game world. This can include all types of video games such as those played on arcade machines (like the Tekken series), home consoles (like Sony's Playstation), hand-held consoles (like Nintendo's Gameboy) and personal computers (like the Doom series).
The video game industry has grown by leaps and bounds since it's inception in the 1970s. One of the industry's giants, Nintendo, sold an average of three games every second from 1983 to 1995. That adds up to over one billion games. That is equal to one game for every teenager on earth, or enough games that, laid end to end, scan the entire equator two and a half times ("Nintendo sells one billionth game," 1995). An industry war has begun to see who can build the newest, fastest, most popular game.
The explosion of the video game industry in the past decade has had many people questioning the content of the games being released. The main concern is that of violence and violent acts within the games. The newest generation of games is so realistic that the line between "simulations" and video games has greatly been blurred. They are so realistic that the United States government has even released a game, entitled America's Army, to help train the next generation of military specialists. In the late 1990's a large number of high-school shootings were blamed on violent video games, the most devastating being the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. These shootings raise a valid concern that violent video games may be affecting the aggression of children and developing adolescents.
The term aggression is very general and can refer to and influence a large number of personality traits and behaviors. Connor, Steingard, Cunningham, Anderson, and Meloni (2004) defined two specific types of aggression. Reactive aggression is an angry, defensive response to a threat or frustration. An example of this would be getting revenge on someone that has done you wrong. Proactive aggression is a deliberate behavior that is controlled by external reinforcements and is usually a means of reaching a desired goal. An example of this type would be robbing a bank to get money. There have yet to be any studies that take into account these two specific types, but most studies in the past have focused on both in some way.
Video games made their first appearance in the early 1970s. The first generation of games used simple shapes and had minimal interaction. The first game, Pong, attempted to simulate ping pong using two rectangle's as paddles, and a small square as the ball. The paddles could be controlled by a human player. This game displayed no violent acts or situations though. The first of popular games to be considered violent was Pac Man. This game consisted of a small circle with a mouth that tried to eat pills and destroy ghosts. Although this hardly seems violent by today's standards, it was one of the first games to involve destruction of any kind.
With the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s and Sony's Playstation in the 1990s came new generations of games, with better graphics and more capabilities. Game developers were no longer as limited by their media, and tried to simulate reality as best as possible. New innovations in technology meant more realistic violence and gore. All these new capabilities meant developers could focus more on details also. One example is the game Soldier of Fortune, released in 2000 for the personal computer. In this game each character has 26 "kill zones," or areas that the character can be hit by a bullet (Gentile, Lynch, Linder, & Walsh, 2004). The game also employs a first-person perspective, making it seem as though the player is seeing through the eyes of the in-game character.
Until the recent resurgence in interest in video games in the past decade, research on the topic was minimal. There were few correlations found, and several had conflicting results. There were three studies which used self report data. Dominick (1984) found that the amount of video games played had a positive correlation with one of three measures of aggression among tenth and eleventh grade boys. However, Gibb, Bailey, Lambirth, and Wilson (1983) found no relation in a larger study of 12-34 year olds. Another study found a correlation between use of arcade games and teachers' ratings of aggressiveness (Lin & Leper, 1987). Due to the conflicting results of these studies, no conclusive correlations could be drawn. Most data seemed to show a positive correlation between videogame play and aggression, yet Gibb et al.'s (1983) study showed otherwise.
There were few experimental studies done on the topic at this time also. Cooper and Mackie (1986) found fifth grade girls to be more aggressive in one of two measures when playing a violent game versus a non-violent game. This data however conflicted with Graybill's (1987) study of second though sixth graders in which he found no greater aggression when playing a violent versus non-violent game. Once again, due to the conflicting results, no conclusive evidence could be drawn to help support that aggression and videogame play are related.
Unfortunately these early studies were not much help in determining a relationship between aggression and video games. These experimenters helped to show that there was a relationship, but there was not enough evidence to prove it strongly in either direction. With the resurgence of interest in violent video games in the past decade, this has changed. This resurgence has been due to a number of factors, but the greatest of which has been the large number of high school shootings that have been blamed on violence in the public media. There were over a dozen incidents of violence, most involving death, that have been blamed on violent video games between 1997 and 2003. These ranged from beating deaths to shooting sprees to sniper shootings, and were not limited to the United States.
Until this resurgence, research on the subject of video games was highly lacking. Considering the amount of time young children and adolescents spend playing them, much more research is needed. Recent contributions have given us a much clearer understanding of the relationship between aggression and video games. They have shown that the relationship may be much more complex than originally thought. The greatest contribution in recent years has been Anderson and Bushman's (2002) general aggression model (GAM).
Considering the popularity of video games much more research needs to be done on this issue. Chambers and Ascione (1987) report that 100% of elementary and high school students surveyed had played video games at least once. That was more than 15 years ago. This is an obvious indicator that video games have entered the mainstream media, and that more research needs to be done on the effects of video games on adolescence. The majority of research thus far has been on the negative effects of video games, mostly due to the violence contained within. But the exact relationship is still undetermined, so research must continue. However, there are also many who hypothesize that video games can have a positive effect on youth, and believe that it is worth time and effort to explore these possibilities. Following are a few areas of research this author believes our time is best spent:
Therapy
Although the majority of video games are violent in nature, there are many emerging that take an intellectual standpoint. These include puzzle games such as the wildly popular Tetris. These types of games stimulate the mind by presenting challenges and puzzles to the player rather than enemies and worlds. Many play them just to keep the mind active and alert. This type of game-play has brought about the idea that video games can be used as a form of therapy. Some of them are relaxing and soothing, and they can be specifically altered to meet an individual patient's needs. A video game can be created to help a specific type of person, whether it is to help connect certain memory cells in the brain, or just help stimulate brain activity in general. Due to the programmatic nature in which video games are created, their possibilities of creation are endless. Gardner (1991) attempted the first research on this issue. He successfully used video games as a form of psychotherapy in children. This success has stimulated much research on this issue, but mostly dealing with mentally-ill or brain-damaged patients.
Eye-Hand Coordination
Playing many of the modern video games requires some sort of skill. The player is required to do quite a bit to "win." There are many things going on in the game at once. For example, the character may be running and shooting at the same time. This requires the real-world player to keep track of the position of the character, where he/she is heading, their speed, where the gun is aiming, if the gunfire is hitting the enemy, and so on. All these factors need to be taken into account, and then the player must then coordinate the brain's interpretation and reaction with the movement in their hands and fingertips. This process requires a great deal of eye-hand coordination and visual-spatial ability to be successful. A relationship has been shown between increased videogame playing and improvements to eye-hand coordination, as well as manual dexterity, and reaction time (Drew & Waters, 1986). Some true experiments would greatly help to support this claim.
Simulations
A simulation is interactive multimedia used to try to simulate some real world phenomenon. Many video games are nothing more than simulations. They are very closely related, and much research that refers to simulations could most likely apply to video games as well. The most well known simulations are flight simulators, which attempt to mimic the reality of flying a plane. All of the controls, including airspeed, wing angles, altimeter, and so on, are displayed for the player, as well as a visual representation of the world, and are updated in real time. For many years large corporations have used simulations to help train and better their employees. However, simulations have so much more possibilities. The United States government has released a game entitled America's Army, which simulates a real war-time experience. The government hopes to use it to help train the next generation of recruits.
Another use for simulations is to mimic the effects of nature. Many modern games use particle systems, thousands of tiny particles in three-dimensional space, which mimic natural phenomena such as rain, fire and smoke. Another popular use is to simulate flocking birds and schooling fish. An excellent example of this is seen in Pixar's Finding Nemo. With deeper research, these simulations can give us a better understanding of our world and our selves.
Conclusion
The advancement of video game research in the past decade has greatly helped our understanding of its effects on development. Unfortunately though, more research is still needed. The video game industry has grown to the proportions of the movie industry, and shows no sign of stopping. With each generation of games come more realistic graphics, more violence, bigger world, and more possibilities. In order to fully control the effect that it has on our children, we must first better understand the effect it has on the personality and behaviors, and not just in the areas of aggression and hostility. As we reach this understanding hopefully developers can create games which will help our youth, expand their minds, and shy away from the current trend of violence in video games.
The most recent Pew Internet Project survey finds that 87% of all youth between. The ages of 12 and 17 use the internet. That translates into about 21 million people. Of those 21 million online teens, 78% (or about 16 million students) say. They use the internet at school. Put another way, this means that 68% of all teenagers have used the internet at school."
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.
In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.
"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."
Bavelier and graduate student Shawn Green tested college students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year. "That alone was pretty tough," says Green. "Nearly everybody on a campus plays video games."
At the outset, the students were given a crowding test, which measured how well they could discern the orientation of a "T" within a crowd of other distracting symbols—a sort of electronic eye chart. Students were then divided into two groups. The experimental group played Unreal Tournament, a first-person shoot-'em-up action game, for roughly an hour a day. The control group played Tetris, a game equally demanding in terms of motor control, but visually less complex.
After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the "T" was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.
"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," says Bavelier. "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."
The improvement was seen both in the part of the visual field where video game players typically play, but also beyond—the part of your vision beyond the monitor. The students' vision improved in the center and at the periphery where they had not been "trained." That suggests that people with visual deficits, such as amblyopic patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need to identify objects very quickly.
The team is now delving into how the brain responds to other visual stimuli. They plan to use what would be a video gamer's dream: a new 360-degree virtual-reality computer lab now being completed at the University of Rochester.
This research appears next week in the journal Psychological Science, and was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
* Video game playing introduces children to computer technology.
* Games can give practice in following directions.
* Some games provide practice in problem solving and logic.
* Games can provide practice in use of fine motor and spatial skills.
* Games can provide occasions for parent and child to play together.
* Players are introduced to information technology.
* Some games have therapeutic applications with patients.
* Games are entertaining and fun.
NEGATIVES
* Over-dependence on video games could foster social isolation, as they are often played alone.
* Practicing violent acts may contribute more to aggressive behavior than passive television watching. Studies do find a relationship between violent television watching and behavior.
* Women are often portrayed as weaker characters that are helpless or sexually provocative.
* Game environments are often based on plots of violence, aggression and gender bias.
* Many games only offer an arena of weapons, killings, kicking, stabbing and shooting.
* Playing violent video games may be related to aggressive behavior (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Gentile, Lynch & Walsh, 2004). Questions have been raised about early exposure to violent video games.
* Many games do not offer action that requires independent thought or creativity.
* Games can confuse reality and fantasy.
* In many violent games, players must become more violent to win. In "1st person" violent video games the player may be more affected because he or she controls the game and experiences the action through the eyes of his or her character.
* Academic achievement may be negatively related to over-all time spent playing video games. (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Gentile, Lynch & Walsh, 2004)
FACTS
* The U.S. video game market reached nearly $10.5 billion in sales in 2005. with the projected world-wide market expected to grow to $46.5 billion by 2010 (BusinessWeek Online, 2006).
* A recent report showed that 45% of heavy video game players and nearly a third of avid gamers are in the 6 to 17 year old age group (NPD Group Inc., 2006).
* The Federal Trade Commission reported that 69% of unaccompanied 13-16 year-olds were able to purchase
* M" rated video games from retailers (Federal Trade Commission, 2004).
* Of computer and video game purchase in 2005, as reported by the NPD Group, 49% were "E" rated games, 4% were "E10+", 32% were "T" rated games, and 15% were "M" rated games (Entertainment Software Association, 2006).
* A study of over 2,000 8 to 18 year-olds (3rd through 12th graders) found the 83% of them have at least one video game player in their home, 31% have 3 or more video game players in their home, and 49% have video game players in their bedrooms (Roberts, Foeher, and Rideout, 2005).
* In the same study only 21% of kids reported that their parents set rules about which video games they can play, 17% reported their parents check warning labels or ratings on video games, and 12% reported they play video games they know their parents don't want them playing (Roberts, Foeher, and Rideout, 2005).
Effects of New Technology and Video Games on Teenagers
(Joo Keng)
(Daniel T.)
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.