Kid Friendly Video Games

Video games have been historically made for the purpose of entertainment. In the beginning games like Pong, Pac Man, and Mario Bros were sensations in 80’s and 90’s. Later came the bigger more intense games but they were still centered on one single concept of entertainment.

Video games for so long have been centered on only entertainment. This has caused a negative perception for letting kids spend a lot of time playing video games. Just having a child plop in front of the T.V. and “waste” his time playing mindless and often repetitive tasks on a video game that has no real world implementations has been the parents concern for the last twenty years.

There has been a movement through the realm of video games to get away from simply entertainment to more rewarding games. The most common feature being added to games to get more out of them then just playing is gaming communities. Gaming communities allow gamers to be entertained while they play but still connect with people and share ideas.

There is a new genre of video games that have come out with the purpose of teaching children while entertaining them. The goal is to take the entertainment of video games and find a way to keep the entertainment but add the element of learning. Video games have been tailor made to teach everything from the abc’s to typing to learning about cancer. Here is a video about how a video game helped teach a cancer patient about what he was dealing with.



With educational video games it is no longer a worry for a parent to simply plug in your child to a video game and let him/her be entertained. However educational video games are not only for children. There are many educational video games for adults these days. An example of this is Food Force, but even the regular video games have proven to be of value for some professionals. The most well documented example is surgeons playing video games. The academic article “The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century“ shows that surgeons that play video games in excess of 3 hours a week made 37% fewer errors and completed surgery 27% faster.

I think that video games have come to be a very helpful tool for children when played in moderation. The fact that a video game is a mean that requires full participation helps educational video games teach children. It seems hard to even get full participation in classrooms these days, which is why I believe video games have huge potential for teaching children. This is something that parents need to utilize.