There have been a lot of debates centring around whether your kids should be allowed to play online games or not. While many experts feel that it’s not harmful, others think that it’s extremely detrimental to your child’s health. Instead of relying on others’ opinion, let’s have a look at both the positive and negative aspects of online gaming and then decide for ourselves whether we will let our children play it or not.

As far as pros are concerned, online gaming comes with a variety of benefits, the first one being its availability. You don’t need money for playing online games as there are lots of websites online offering such facility without any cost involved.

Another important benefit is that it offers some kind of refreshment to the users. It may help you stay away from stress, depression and other kinds of mental turbulences if you stay engrossed in online games. It will transcend you into a whole different world.

Moreover it will increase your interactive skills. While playing online you must coordinate with other people or partners of the game which will, in turn, develop your communication skills. This can be helpful to the gamers as constant interaction will help you to reinforce team-building skills and other cognitive abilities. A study was once conducted to determine the level of socialization skills of the gamers in comparison to the non-gamers. Dr Nick Taylor who coordinated the study opined, “Gamers were often exhibiting many social behaviours at once — watching games, talking, drinking and chatting online.”

It means that gamers are multi-taskers. They can do lots of work together at the same time. However, despite the fact that they are lots of benefits, it is also true that there are some harmful impacts as well.

The biggest problem is that gamers are very reluctant to socialize with people in the real context. They don’t want to talk to people in real life situation rather they become more habituated to virtual world and conversations.

Moreover, for some people the enjoyment turns into an addiction and they start spending a considerable amount of time on virtual platforms for playing games, which ultimately hamper their other activities. At one stage, they also fail to prioritize their day-to-day activities.

In short, there is no denying that online games can be a rewarding experience often, but we should not forget that excess of anything is bad. Keeping this in mind we must learn to play online games judiciously without sacrificing our other priorities.

(The writer is a gamer.)