Video-games have being among us for a few decades now, and a lot have been said of young children playing with this vicious machines. One thing seems clear for many: they are bad. That’s it. They can say any kind of bad behavior on their children to be an effect of playing video-games. And that’s wrong. Video-games are just games.
Well, not just games. Even when there are some bad effects, like dependency or lost of time, a bunch of good effects are almost never mentioned. Some of those are listed below.
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One of many ways of behavior changing techniques you can “apply on yourself”, say, to become a better student, get rid of social awkwardness, or virtually any characteristic you feel is bad for you, is that of giving yourself a prize for any goal accomplished. While that is pretty much ok, what kind of prize it is will affect the way the “behavior changing technique” becomes useful or useless.
Giving yourself chocolate for every mile ran is kind of contradictory if you’re trying to lose weight. Giving yourself a chocolate for every page of homework done is a different approach, a more useful one.
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Even when a lot of progress has been made through the years in the science and technology areas, that can’t really be thanks to the educational systems in the western world. And I can say that not based on my school, but on research. I’m writing a pre-grade thesis (or whatever it is called) and part of it is looking through international researches relating the lack of math skills in students. You may foresee my readings included the educational system in general.
The education system is not working since a couple of decades ago. Not the way it’s supposed to, at least. Of course some get higher than others and reach college and farther away. Most don’t. That’s the problem.
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With days thinking about Pokémon and video-games, I can’t really let this topic falls out of my hands and the blog’s. some times you hear about letting it all go, living on the present and all that. And I think it’s ok: you understand bad things happen, and they must not mark you forever. But what about good things?
One thing I never liked about such statement that says “you must forget the past, because you live in the present” or something like that, is that some things of the past must not, necessarily, be erased. The “recommendation” is for you to stop living in the past, and by it means 2 things.
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We live our days thinking that, in general, today’s experiences will be somehow similar to yesterday’s experiences. I mean, if you have an office job or go to any kind of school, the monotony of doing almost the same things, in overall, than any other day. We know that, in reality, no day is the same. Yet in your memory, days are stored based in events different from those you usually live.
You brush your teeth everyday (…right?), I’m sure you can’t remember any other day of you brushing your teeth. Unless, of course, something were different at the time.
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Any given language has words you can say speaking but not write them at all, or words that you write but don’t usually say because no conversation would have them in. Think about words like “gotta”, a contraction for “have got to”. Speaking the “have got to” may become “gotta”. ut you wouldn’t write gotta because it’s just not right. It’s not part of English’s written language.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. As language is any method of human communication, either verbal or nonverbal, one can see clear differences between spoken language and written language.
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I’ve realized through years that a life’s value relays mostly on who you ask. Everyday watching the news you can see death everywhere. It’s harsh to think about that. Death is everywhere; it’s a fact. We are born, we grow up, we die. Circle of life. But even when we are conscious about death around, we can’t stand death nearby.
I must say one thing I find true about ourselves as people. “3 students were killed in an accident somewhere” will not cause the same effect as “The students John Doe, James Smith and Mary Poppins were killed in an accident somewhere”. The reason? We fear death: we fear real people dying, not numbers. Giving the name of a victim, a dead person, gives us information about such person. The more information we have, the more human that person becomes, and so that harder it hurts.
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