The debate between the side effects of torture being linked with entertainment as a problem has been debated for a long time. Many parents are appalled at the graphics in recent video games and probably wonder how realistic they are now. I have talked to many parents and they are hesitant for their kids to play the next, first person shooter games like Call of Duty or Halo or Titian Fall. Interestingly enough, when talking to the kids they found first person shooter games to be something like therapeutic. I pushed this thought further, and most of them answered that since the games are so realistic, they can vent out and lash their feelings out to the virtual public than those in their families. These points prompted me to see the flip note of the age-old question of whether video games actually caused the snowball effect of violence in children. I didn’t want to get into the political details, however, wanted to look at it from a scientific standpoint. “Were there any physiologic or neurological benefits to playing first shooter video games?”

Pushing the scientific envelope was going to be tricky and even more political than I imagined but the findings were very interesting.

First shooter games require a lot of hand-eye coordination. There is not a huge physical expectation of playing a video game in comparison to a sport, but the amount of concentration and it equally important to be aware of your surroundings in both cases. I.e.: one must be conscience about an opposing team’s tactics in football, and the even though you yourself aren’t required to physically dodge out of the way, first person shooter games require the player to be vigil of where the enemy is and work hard to reach a specific goal. When I delved into the scientific aspect of video games, I focused my efforts on seeing its role specifically on the cognitive neuroscience perspective and how it damaged, or in this argument, builds our neural connections.

When reading the book “A Brain that Changes Itself” by psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, and data read from abstracts from Sijng Wu in the PubMed databases it became clear that the neuroplasticity change specifically targeted children with amblyopia (lazy eye) and those who had problems with attention. Neural connections are key for a form of electric energy to pass through the synapse for our bodies to react or move a specific way. Think of the game Telephone. If there aren’t enough strong people with good listening skills then the ending message (the body) will have a different message than the original one (the brain). In this analogy, we see that children with lazy eye have problems with the late developmental of neural connections to that specific eye; because of that the dominate eye will continue to grow stronger and the weaker one weaker. A great way to treat this if a child has passed the critical stage of seven years old is to allow them to play first person shooter games. In this analogy, if there are not enough people, then they themselves can’t practice enough to gain better communication skills from the brain. As controversial as this is, studies show that covering the dominant eye, and forcing the weaker eye to focus on specific targets spurts neural growth, which can be tracked to functionality of the once lazy eye. These games, like Halo or Black Ops forces children—past the neural proliferation stage—to develop new connections through the forced hand-eye target practice that is required to shoot a moving object. Again, I do not condone violent games for children, and look at it from a scientific standpoint, void of the pointless claims. I believe that FPS games allow for an alternative therapeutic technique to help children who lack the neural connections necessary to process visual images. This stops the domination of neuron circuits of the dominate eye and opens the door to a solution to a problem which once people thought couldn’t be solved past the age of seven.