Popular Electronics
Thirty years ago, when IBM company presented their first personal computer, a huge and heavy construction, it was laughed at. “Popular Electronics” wrote that “Nobody will ever be mad enough to buy such a machine to have in the house”.
In the course of time it proved to be wrong. Today over 80 per cent of families in Russia have a PC, and more than 40 million people are regular users of the Internet. In Europe 96 per cent of families have a PC in the house. First computers were meant for work only: they allowed operations with a lot of numbers simultaneously. Later computers were provided with the Office software for typing text, making table, presentations and stocks of data. The computer industry turned into the industry of entertainment only with the development of graphic and sound, or multimedia facilities. The first computer game was made only in 1980, and since that time the industry swept the world like a hurricane. The majority of games are intended for teenagers, but many grown-ups also become addicted to them.
Computer games
Computer games as a social phenomenon have the positive and the negative side. The positive effect of computer games lies in their educational and developing role. Playing games, children acquire the habits of working with the computer and find the way about the new programme better. There are also many educational games, for example, logic games, strategy games which develop tactics and the ability to take many factors into account. There are games that teach history or a foreign language. But there are also many games which are not simply useless, but even harmful, as they develop aggression and cruelty. They are the so-called “shooters” and RPG-games, where you have to roam about the game world and kill all the enemies. I believe these games should be prohibited, as they have no positive influence.
Games are very time-consuming
Another thing, games are very time-consuming. A standard computer game is intended for about a hundred of game hours, which is equal to a good educational course. Wasting time on computer games, we spent our life on chimerical achievements – having no real ones.
So I believe that computer games can be useful, but usually they do nothing but mere harm, consuming time and energy, ruining our eyesight, and addicting people to an imaginary world. They can be a wonderful pastime after studies or work, when you can forget about all the problems for an hour building an ancient city or leading a war against Barbarians; but playing computer games should not come into habit. Most computer games are produced in English, and this contributes to acquiring many English words subconsciously, but in general I think that computer games sold in the country should be controlled by the government and many games with violence should be excluded from use, especially from use by children.
