My Rhetorical Analysis

Video Games Affect the Brain—for Better and Worse
By Douglas A. Gentile, Ph.D.

Dr. Douglas Gentile is the director of Media Research Lab in the psychology department at Iowa State University. While he’s there at the lab, he studies and conducts researches on the mass media’s effect on children and adults. He’s a co-author of Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (2007, Oxford University Press). He’s well qualified in this area and effectively researches on many factors that may have an effect on children and adults. In this article, he listed both the pros and cons of consequences for children who play video games. Therefore, he was not being biased, but instead he gave his professional opinion and wrote them based on reasons and facts; logos. He also used others’ ideas to further cement the main points of his article like this quote that was listed in his article, “One neuroscience study, published in Nature, showed that playing action video games can improve visual attention to the periphery of a computer screen.” I decided to choose this article because I am a fan of video games and I have always get involved in many discussions concerning video games and why is it good or bad for you. I strongly believed that video games aren’t really bad for us if we carefully manage our time or minimize our addiction to video games.

To state the pros in the heated issue about video games, he used his and others researches to state, that educational games are good for your brains and also may help strengthen your working memory if it has lot of repetitions in video games. Also, he said low-violence activity and pro-social games has demonstrated that it was more helpful to players who was able to learn the concept of teamwork or improved their teamwork skills.
He also stated the cons by using resources from respected scientists and researchers. The “addiction” to video games had negative consequences as well. Video games were linked to obesity, isolation, poor academic performances, and also may cause a distortion between reality and fantasy. In the researches shown in his article, high violence games have caused the players to be more aggressive in real life. Also, experienced players have been desensitized to violence in video games, while new players would experience high emotional reactions to the intensity of violence in the games.

I felt that this article by Dr. Gentile have opened many parents’ minds to the aspect of video games and let them realize that video games are also good for the children. I certainly disagree with the cons because I never really experienced these symptoms or consequences of video games. However, I was able to comprehend the risks of playing video games because my future kids maybe will play video games as well. He used logos to execute and clarify his main point of his article and prove that video games is just another form of entertainment that influences us.

http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=22800