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Where I live, in Shipley, West Yorkshire it is normal for a girl to have a baby aged between 14 and 16, it is ok for young boys to drink underage and when a teenage boy is addicted to heroin, nobody bats an eyelid. In fact right now in the block of flats I live in there is a drug addicted 17 year old, who also has a child and is a single parent, due to her 19 year old boyfriend being in prison.

Why then must you point the blame for today’s decline in youth society upon video games? How can a harmless piece of hardware which brings a small portion of happiness to millions of people be a bad thing?

Would you rather I was a drug addict?

I live in a rough area; I am a student at college living on a pittance (£30 a week), I get no financial support from anyone yet I have never had the urge to do drugs, alcohol or be ‘anti-social’. You see video games and my home computer provide me with an escape from this rat infested hellhole, my alcoholic mother, and my drug addicted older brother.

It is through these video games I aim to escape this all, by passing college and earning a decent and respectable living. I am studying game development

So we come to the point. The blame doesn’t lie with video games, it lies with the government. They encourage teenagers to live for free on jobseekers allowance. They pay students less than the unemployed thus discouraging the idea of becoming enrolled in education. They offer recovering drug addicts equally addictive drugs which apparently help them recover.

And finally, I put a question to you.

Of all the things mentioned above, would you rather YOUR child be addicted to video games, or drugs?

I face this choice every day…

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I always advocated classical education when I was young because I was a traditionalist at heart; only having done Latin and Classics up to A-level have I really understood their value.

I grant that computers do teach certain skills – but the addiction itself is often damaging to academic success, reducing time spent on work.

All the references to wikipedia and the BBC site are quite off topic – that’s nothing to do with PC games. I myself read Hansard online. What of it?

I occasionally give in to an impulse to play Age of Empire: Conquerors Expansion, usually to design scenarios on; likewise Medieval:Total War: Viking Invasion, with the Total Realism patch and a number of edits to increase historical accuracy still further.

But what Total War is doing for me is simulating a board game, in a sophisticated way, which I would be happier playing with a real-life person.

Games are good for you, they do increase the powers of your brain, but board games/wargames/etc can do the same as pc games, without most of the negative side effects. More sociable and with more freedom for ones own imagination. I used to play warhammer; before that I made up various games with model knights and so on. I used to make up games with my younger siblings in the garden: and what taught me the football related maths referred to by one earlier poster was poring over genuine premier league tables, which proved to be effective enough.

A point I would like to make is that it all depends on what sort of person you actually want to create at the end of it all. “Intelligence” is pretty broad.

Also, as with many things, computer games are not necessarily so terrible “in moderation”.

One problem with spending ages on the PC is that it reduces your ability to concentrate. It also damages inhibitions; it is also very easy to sit on the computer and never leave it, and let your body fall to pieces. It disturbs sleep patterns, and communication with other people is all very well, but it’s not good for you if they speak in abbreviations and emoticons and textspeak.

I don’t have any evidence here: I’m going from personal experience, which has been mixed, and observation of my friends, who were very a fantasy/wargames/computer games group/rugby/football/history/writing/art group in terms of interests shared by more than one person, all of whom I knew/know very well.

I used to run a warhammer rules development website, called The Hammer and Anvil. I don’t know how it’s doing now, because a few months ago I finally cut myself off from it. This has done me an enormous amount of good. Even though, whilst I had it, I ran a site on fairly sound business principles, organized people, wrote stories, improved my critical faculties, and so on: and we had a lot of very educated sorts of people – I learnt all sorts of things about Arabian poetry for example. But I could’ve learnt that same stuff from a book. I could’ve practiced those skills with real people. And without the negative side effects.

So – I’ll stop rambling now – my point is that Boris is, as usual, exagerrating to say that PC games and computer use, etc etc, can have no benefits, but there are other much less harmful/potentially harmful means of enhancing said skills. Moreover, console games are worse than PC games from observation/experience, and, addiction to them is bad for you – and I would also say that being absorbed in them at too early an age is probably bad for you.

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I think that video games is connected with the problem, but don’t think it is the root cause of it. My personal opinion is that working in parliament rots the brain, of varying opinion (instead of jumping on the anti-gaming band-waggon) and ability to use fact, rather than just blaming something just because you don’t understand it!

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