The Impact of Video Games on Gamers: the Problem of Determining the Transformational Potential of Gaming Activity
The paper presents a critical and analytical review of national and foreign scientific works on transformational effects of video games. It focuses the attention on contradictions in the data presented by scientists on the impact of the gaming activity on psychological changes among gamers. It carries out a comparison of the results of the research, presented in the scientific literature, on the impact of computer games on gamers with aggressive and violent content. The article shows the differences in the results of investigating the impact of video games on attention deficit among players, their anxiety and depression, and poor progress at school. It indicates the tendency to unreasonable stereotyping of ideas about the negative effect of the gaming activity. It shows that the differences in the results obtained are caused not only by the subjectivity of the researchers and the ambiguous research methodology, but also by the fact that the game is not differentiated, without isolating its formal and substantive components, which alone or in systemic interaction with other components of the game can explain the transformational effect.