Gateway to English Language: Video Games and Education - "Are Video Games Really That Bad?"

Hello again, everyone! What I have for you today is a very contemporary and ever-growing topic. Video games and how they are perceived in relation to education. In a lecture today, we have watched this very good document above which describes many situations and cases regarding this topic, and now in a couple of short paragraphs I will be summarizing it to you.
As we all know, video games are a huge part of today's world and its inhabitants. It's not just the younger generation who's involved in it, everyone from young adults to the elderly play video games. In certain cases, some even better than what popular belief is, that is, only young people can be good at video games. There is however, another side of this coin in terms of popular belief: violent video games make people violent. In this video and my brief summary, it will be demonstrated how that is not the case at all.
First of all, to be able to talk about the benefits of video games, and how they can actually be applied to education, we have to go a bit into detail about "Gamification". Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists – a website, an enterprise application, an online community – and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty. This can also be applied to classroom environments. A primitive example of gamification in such a context would be rewarding students with a reward for a task that they wouldn’t necessarily partake in, such as a boring reading or matching activity. That activity can be "gamified" by giving objectives for the students to accomplish and after which they would be given a reward in the form of anything that may increase motivation for said activity.
That's exactly how almost all of the video games in this trillion-dollar industry work. You have an objective to complete, and in order to do so you must accomplish certain smaller tasks, play accordingly and when you succeed, you advance to the next level. Some games are single player while most of the others today are able to be played cooperatively with your friends in a multiplayer mode. Being able to use this in education would not only potentially increase student motivation and desire for participation, but also create beautiful and fun experiences for them to enjoy. School would not be the traditional, boring place where the teacher makes them read and repeat stuff anymore, it would be imaginative, limitless in creativity and most of all, collaborative in most cases.
To return to the misconception of violence being caused by playing video games, there are numerous researches that prove otherwise, with the fact that only 4% to 9% of all gamers have been observed to be violent in their daily lives. What happens to the rest of the 91% or so? Just because that 9% is determined to be violent because of video games does not mean everybody who plays violent, action-packed video games are actually violent. On the contrary, playing action, fast paced video games increases our eye-to-hand coordination, enhances our decision making capabilities, increases our situational and environmental awareness and so on... These advantages are often overlooked due to the aforementioned misconception, but students with such attributes may very much excel at their learning endeavors.

To finish, here are some examples of video games that have been mentioned above. I hope you've enjoyed reading these paragraphs, see you later!