Gaming Has Perks?

 One thing that surprises a lot of people is the amount of soft skills you can gain from playing games. For this post I have compared 2 different articles that explain the benefits of playing video games, except I believe one is much better than the other. One of the articles, coming from Game Quitters and the other coming from Understood.Org. Of these two articles one does a better job of going into more detail about the benefits of gaming than the other.

First, let's take a look at Understood's article. Understood's article is catered towards parents - outlining the upsides to gaming. The article consists of 6 short bullet points outlining a skill and why / how it is encouraged or taught. Some of the skills they reference are visual-spacial skills, flexible thinking, and understanding social life. There are a few more skills they reference, but they're not worth overviewing. Overall, I think this article does a good job of grabbing actually well-learned skills from gaming, but I feel they are only scratching the surface. They could be pursuing much more with this than they are.

The second article, the one from Game Quitters is catered towards a more broad audience, this could be for parents, gamers, or people purely interested in the topic. I really enjoy this article because they give a quick summary at the very beginning, a very short overview of all the points they are making. But as they progress down the list, they provide actual scientific experiments and studies conducted that prove their point. For example, they go into a lot of detail about more cognitive improvements. Or they also go into detail about faster decision making. Instead of just making comments out of pure emotion and personal experience, they are providing accurate information backed by research.

I believe that is one thing that makes an article or blog post go above and beyond expectations. Whenever a writer links to a source that has proven that they / their points are validated, it shows the amount of effort they put in. It also shows the difference between our two articles chosen, one focuses on personal experiences and the other utilizes actual research.