Video Games Make Life Better: Not Strong Enough Argument

The development of technology has facilitated the improvement of services quality offered in the game industry. By 2012, more than 58% of Americans were playing video games. This raised a lot of concern about the health effects of playing video games. Melanie Pinola authored an article in the life hacker in 2015 entitled Top 10 ways Video games can improve Real life. She argues that although people enjoy the video games for varying reasons of entertainment and fun, the video games positively influence the lives of the gamers. Melanie starts building her argument with facts and employing emotional appeal to the readers on how the video games help improve life. Nevertheless, in her entire article, she has chosen to evoke the emotional appeals to convince the readers on the importance of video games. The excessive appeals are not strong enough to authenticate the credibility of her work.

In her article, Melanie sets the stage of her article by employing facts on the universal use of video games. She then continues to describe the top ten ways in which the video games can improve the real life. She identifies the top ten ways the video game improves life to be leveling up the entire life, rewiring the brain for positivity and happiness, getting into a good workflow, learning to be patient, getting better at multi-tasking, meeting new people, and relieving stress. Others include exercising the brain and improve the problem-solving skills, learning how to deal with people in real life and finally learn personal accountability.

Throughout her article, Melanie uses facts of the logos appeal which is not strong enough to support her argument and improve her content. She goes further to explicitly use real game examples positive impact on the lives of certain people. She cites the case of one Alan Henry who explored the Ingress video game to find new friends in the world. Also, the people engaged in playing Tetris game are very useful in helping people become very positive and enhance the brain power. Nevertheless, the failure to cite the sources of her information makes the whole document questionable as to whether it is her opinion or stolen ideas. The sources she has used are not strong enough to support the credibility of her study. Further, she does not give a personal account how the video games impacted on her life positively.

After the logos appeal approach she uses to capture the attention of the readers, Melanie employs the logos as well to justify the effectiveness of the video games to improving life although the argument is not strong enough. The Tetris Effect teaches us that when we do things over and over, they take less brain power to do over time and our brains try to continue to make these connections. We can teach ourselves to overcome our negativity bias with the Positive Tetris Effect: practicing looking for positive patterns in our lives. Playing Tetris might even help wipe out bad memories and stop food cravings! These facts asserted by Melanie in her article suggest that she supports the idea that video games improve the life of humanity by enhancing positivity of the mind. Further, she continues with the facts that:

For many people, playing video games is much-needed downtime. The psychological benefits of playing video games can carry over into real life when they relieve stress and anxiety. Some studies have shown immersive games can even treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Of course, this depends on us not playing rage-inducing games.

Nevertheless, the facts she uses are not strong enough to base her article that video games improve the life of humanity. She uses pathos to appeal to construct these facts to be rightly perceived by her readers.

Melanie uses the strategy that is not strong enough of progressive numbering the top ten ways in which video games can improve life. She chooses to start with the tenth to the first to keep the readers curious to know the best way in which the video games has improved the lives of humanity. She chooses this strategy to support those in favor of her ideology that video games enhance and makes life better for humanity. Her choice of ranking the ways it improves the experience of people. This will not only underscores her point in favor of video game fun but also give a probability hint on how it will better the lives in the ascending order from the tenth way of learning personal accountability to the first beneficial way of leveling the entire life of the gamer. The only weakness with her approach is that her choice to number the ways video games improves life is not strong enough to validate the order.

Melanie utilizes words that are not strong enough to capture the attention of the readers to agree with the line of thought. In her statement One thing probably all video gamers learn is the sadness of finishing a game you enjoy or calling it quits on one that is no longer giving you that joy. Whether it is World of Warcraft or Flappy Bird, games force us to undergo frustrations about beginning over or walking away. These are the identical emotions and feelings we have to experience sometimes in real lifeand video games could be good practice for knowing when to quit in general, She uses words that are pathos in nature to capture the sympathy of the readers. Such words she uses include sadness, joy, frustrations and enjoy.' However, the words are not very strong on their own to evoke the emotions of the readers to buy into her idea (Henry, 2012.

In conclusion, though Melanie desired to convince her readers that playing video games has a way of improving life in a certain scale of choices, her argument and facts are not strong enough to suffice as a credible source of information that can support the credibility of her content.

Reference

European Conference on Games Based Learning, & Felicia, P. (2012). Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Games Based Learning, 4-5 October 2012, [College Cork], Ireland. Reading: Academic Publishing International Limited.

Henry, A. (2012, February 01). In Defense of Video Games: More Than Just an Entertaining Time Sink. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from https://lifehacker.com/5881205/in-defense-of-video-games-more-than-just-an-entertaining-time-sink