Old School

Back in Shmoop's youth, heading to the arcade with a pocket full of tokens was a pretty sweet way to spend a Saturday afternoon. (Sure, after we spent the morning curled up reading Aristotle and solving derivatives. We are Shmoop, after all).

Back to the afternoon.

As far as we were concerned, there was nothing better than standing for hours in front of giant consoles in sweat-soaked, dimly lit rooms beeping with first generation sound effects and maneuvering Pac-Man, Mario, and various Track and Field athletes through their heroic feats.

Back in those days, a day in the arcade didn't feel like a waste at all, and most importantly—we were never hassled about it. At least not seriously. So what's changed? Why, over the years, has video gaming, and the amount of time people devote to it, turned into such a hot button issue?

The arcade is dead; long live the arcade!

One big difference is that arcades, while still pretty darned fun (in Shmoop's less-than-humble opinion), are no longer necessary. Tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands?—of games can be easily accessed via home gaming consoles and computers, so the need to actually leave the house (one of the factors that probably reduced our parents' anxieties about the way we were spending our time back in the day) has been eliminated.

Now, a dedicated gamer need not even leave the bedroom (or even the bed) to engage in a weekend's worth of game play…which also means that game play needn't be reserved for weekends.

Video games are accessible to anyone who wants to play them virtually anytime, anywhere—without leaving the house or, necessarily, interacting with another human being—and that's one of the issues that has parents and educators concerned. There's also the content issue—as in, whether or not video games contain any meaningful content that encourages learning or growth.

These concerns leave us wondering: Are we raising a generation of young people who will have no social skills? Who will, in fact, be anti-social? And who will lack basic knowledge in core subject areas (not to mention art and culture appreciation) because they spend all of their time playing first-person shooter games in their bedrooms while ignoring the rest of the world?

If there's not already an apocalypse movie with that exact plot, we can only imagine that's just because the producers are too busy playing video games…

And then there was Netflix.

To be fair, it's not just video games that keep today's students from spending their school breaks cartwheeling through meadows, climbing trees, playing board games, and settling down in cozy corners with good books. Movies and clips, memes and gifs, blogs, tweets, and status updates consume multiple hours in most adolescents' (ahem, and most adults') daily routines.

Add to that emails, chats, texts, IM sessions, and time spent completing screen-related work for school, job, or other personal pursuits and it's rather sobering—and somewhat frightening—to realize just how much of a young person's life may be spent interacting with a screen. Not all young people, but enough to have made both video gaming and screen time issues of major concern for parents and educators.

So let's get into this, but let's keep it organized. The way we see it, there are two separate issues here:

• Video gaming: What are the hazards? What are the benefits? Do video games, in fact, have educational value?

• Screen time: How much is too much? What kind of limits should be set? Are we overreacting (the way older generations typically overreact) to the way our youth are spending their free time?

See? Two separate issues, and we're going to handle them as such. So keep on reading here:

Video Gaming

Screen Time: Part II

And enjoy the enlightenment. We're only sorry you have to do your reading on a screen (hey, you could always print them all out…)