In his article for The Pioneer, Govind Bhattacharjee recounts an incident about a young boy who used to excel in academics and outdoor sports before suddenly going on a downward spiral. This sudden transition was disturbing for his parents, and they set out to investigate the matter.
Being working professionals, they could not focus on what their child was doing during the daytime in their absence. But, the sudden deterioration of his cheerfulness and academic interests made his parents wonder about the root cause behind the change. After much interrogation and investigation, the parents discovered that a computer video game was the reason behind their child’s dwindling performance.
They confiscated the CD, but such simple restrictions were not enough to calm the boy’s addiction. It took the parents one year of strict persuasion to convince the boy to give up his gaming addiction. However, the addiction had already affected the boy’s physical and mental health.
Bhattacharjee recalls this as a common story as “countless parents have gone through similar agonies and many children have paid dearly for such addiction to video games.”
While pointing at the menace of online games, an additional district judge, on 2 August, had written to the Prime Minister asking him to ban Free Fire and PUBG India as these games had “devastating adverse effect on the development of children.”
As evidently put, longer gaming hours seriously affect a child’s study and social behavior. Therefore, the additional district judge, Naresh Kumar Laka, pleaded to restrict a child’s exposure to such games similar to China’s recent law restricting gaming hours.
In the last quarter of 2020, the Indian government banned PUBG and 117 other Chinese apps while obliging under Section 69A of the IT Act. Not only India, countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kore, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, and China itself have issued a ban on multinational tech giant Tencent’s PUBG. According to certain studies, the game is highly addictive and harms users’ health while giving way to violent attitudes.
Within a year, Google’s Play Store had a similar game called “Battlegrounds Mobile India” with minor UI changes. The game makers replaced red blood with green as if it lessened the impact of violent content. The game has caused a major deterioration of a child’s academic performance and contributed to violent behavior and increased suicide rates.
The worsening scenario
A Goan minister called the games “demonic” in the wake of their harmful side effects on children’s physical and mental health. As the threat of ban started looming over the game, PUBG earlier had promised that it would put time limits on its usage. However, nothing of this sort came forth. With various studies coming to the forefront, the severity of the adverse effects on these online games garnered greater attention from policymakers and parents alike.
Note that the designers of these games are professionally trained neuroscientists, psychologists, and human behavior analysts who include such baits within the UI that a user feels more addicted to “do it again.” The brain released more dopamine, hence inculcating pleasure within the user through simple stimuli such as reward points. In recent studies, we can find evidence that excessive gaming can alter the structure of many regions in the brain.
Bhattacharjee further elaborates in his article that children with poor impulse control are more likely to fall prey to charmingly addictive games such as PUBG India and Free Fire, thereby resulting in decreased retention, sleep deprivation, fatigue, irritability, and in worst cases, suicide.
Moreover, children who play such games regularly are more prone to anxiety, obesity, aggression, losing interest in social activities, and decreased physical workouts.
As we know, online games are an easy escape from forming real-time bonds with parents and friends.
“Studies using brain scans showed decreased activity in areas of the brain dedicated to self-control and an increase in emotional arousal while playing games that use violence; it also desensitizes them to violence in real life,” says Bhattacharjee.
International recognition of harmful effects
WHO lists “gaming disorder” as an intermittent disease among its list of “International Classification of Disease.” If you still have a firm belief in the purgatory powers of online games, maybe you should check with WHO.
Recollecting another incident, Bhattacharjee says, “I know of an addicted boy who forgot how to speak and had to be treated and counseled for more than six months before relearning how to speak again.”
Governments all over the world are shedding their burden and putting the responsibility on parents to maintain a vigilant eye on their kids.
But, does this mean that the parents’ are solely responsible if their child suffers from the side effects of these games? Why does no government hold itself accountable?
We cannot rule out the few positive outcomes of video games, but the negative impacts overrule and outweigh them without a second thought.
The games are not restricted worldwide, but 15 countries have imposed a strict ban on some of the other forms of video games.
- The Chinese government has restricted a 90 minutes policy on online games during weekdays.
- The US Supreme Court in 2011 refused to regulate the sale of violent video games.
- The UK follows a system of rating of games for different age groups.
However, India has no such system or law to regulate video games.
Video gaming constitutes a multi-billion-dollar industry, even more than movies and DVDs combined. Bhattacharjee illustrates that COVID-19 confined everyone to their homes and “both children and adults have sought their escape from boredom through online gaming in massive numbers. FY21 has seen a major boom in online gaming with over 433 million users, with estimated revenue of Rs 136 billion which is poised to grow to Rs 290 billion with 657 million users by FY25. India had about 400 video gaming companies, including respected names like Infosys, TCS, and Zensar. India is the number one market for video games, and domestic and foreign companies would use all their lobbying power to prevent any ban or regulation upon such lucrative business.”
The Chinese Government is now behind its own tech giants and its largest target is the for-profit online tutoring industry while Tencent might be second on the list. Furthermore, on August 3, Tencent’s shares plummeted by 1.6% when a media article labeled gaming as the “opium of the mind.” It also lost its market value by 400 billion dollars in February in its home country, China.
Bhattacharjee concludes the article by emphasizing the need to act “before this lethal opium enslaves our children. Otherwise, we might be a nation of an obese and intellectually stunted generation.
