What Are The Four Characteristics Of Video Games?

The four traits of a game include “goals, rules, feedback and voluntary participation” (McGonigal 21). The goals give a sense of purpose, rules promote strategic thinking, feedback gives the motivation to keep playing, and voluntary participation makes the game feel safe and pleasurable. “Pong,” one of the first video games to come into the mainstream that consisted of a vertical sliding bars and a small square block that acted like a ball; the goal was to prevent the ball from going off of the screen. The game required less than 8kb of memory in 1972. Today, games are requiring upwards of 30 GB, which is 30,000,000kb! Another example is an average size of a picture taken by modern smartphones are 3000kb. This kind of memory is needed to increase the polygon count so then it can be a more accurate representation of what reality looks like. This makes the object appear smoother to our eyes because it becomes increasingly more difficult to see the all the individual shapes and thus gives a higher level of detail. With video games rising in popularity overall having “83% of young people ages 8-18 have a video console at home” (Glazer 941). When including smartphone games, there are 183 million active gamers in the United States alone; that’s more than half the population! This shows that there could be a profound

Mass shootings are often blamed on video games for inducing a violent behavior, claiming the behavior wasn 't present before. Some games intentionally cause distress in the player and activate their fight or flight reaction, causing a habit of that response. Video games are not like the daily life and you are able to do things you can 't normally do which causes the individual to try to make their game their life. Are video games harming our health? Video Games can definitely be good for someone 's health, because it stimulates brain growth, relieves stress and strengthen social