My view of computer games

I like computer games but I am also a little afraid of them. The problem is that some games possess the ability to arrest the player's attention in a way that he or she is so engrossed in playing that everything besides playing appears unimportant.

In fact, this is a major reason for playing a game because one wants to get away from it all, however this may become a serious issue when the player is no longer able to estimate whether there are other important things to do or not.

Apart from this fact, I think that games are not dangerous at all. Some friends of mine are playing computer and video games frequently - including ego shooter and other rather brutal games and none of them is aggressive though.

From a very abstract point of view you can say that some ego shooter games ask the player to reach a certain aim and other people (opponents/enemies) vigorously try to avoid him or her from accomplishing. The solution for this problem which is offered by the game itself is to kill all those people. Thus, some people say that players will add this option for problem solving to their personal set of problem solving strategies in "real life".

Nevertheless, this conclusion implies that the player is not able to distinguish between "real life" and the game. In my opinion this is not correct, because if someone decides to play a game he or she will make an active decision to enter a fictive world. The decision must be active because the reason why games are played, as mentioned before, is to escape from the real world.

Hence for instance watching TV could be more dangerous than playing computer games because of the fictive and non fictive content, which can cause more difficulties to differentiate between "real life" and "non real life".

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