Much has been written about the impact of video games on a child’s propensity for violence, but I have seen little evidence to support these claims. What I have seen is the destructive impact of playing video games on a student’s ability to be educated.
Take Alex. Educating Alex is like educating a bean bag. At home, he spends every waking moment playing video games, and so he has excellent finger muscles but no muscles anywhere else, particularly not his brain. Lulled into a stupor by constant gameplay, he is as close to a vegetable as it is possible for a human to be without climbing into a marrow suit. Ask him to speak and he growls. Ask him to move and he looks at you in a way that encourages you not to ask again.
He’s overweight, lazy, completely demotivated and wiped out of brainpower every single day. And although I don’t have the scientific proof, I know it’s the games. He does nothing else but play games.
So I talk to his mother. “It doesn’t hurt; it’s an interest,” she says. We both look at Alex. I sense we have different ideas of what constitutes hurt. How many hours does he play the games? “Oh, sometimes through the night,” she says, proudly.
Alex is an extreme example. For other students, the games are not as destructive but they are no less an addiction. “I really wanted to do the homework, Miss, but the Xbox was just there, staring at me and you think, ‘Just one game...’”
You can imagine what school was like when the latest Grand Theft Auto game came out. In one class of 30, five boys were “off ill”. One said the day before that he would not be in because he was going to buy the game that night.
Is the answer to take the games away from them? Is it the games industry’s fault? No. But we do need to move the debate away from whether video games create killers and on to how we can manage children’s desire to play them so that it is productive, not destructive. If we don’t, we will have a generation of students that no amount of performance-related pay, targets and government strategies will help.
The writer is a teacher in Scotland
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Email jon.severs@tes.co.uk.
