Since the computers entered the modern community, they’ve gained more and more influence over a lot of people’s lives. But the biggest influence the computer’s got is over the youth. You use computers to do quite a lot of things nowadays, but mainly three things: work, communication and play. There’s always new computers that are being developed with better performance and quality, while the prices for the “older” computers are being reduced, which means that almost everyone can afford a computer. Nowadays computers can be found in almost every home. There are two large factors that explain why today’s youth spend so much time by the computer. The first is the Internet, which is an incredibly large source of information to anyone that seeks knowledge and a place where people with the same interests can spend their time with each other and discuss things that interest them. (In so called communities) That’s some of the good sides of the Internet, but there are quite an amount of bad things too, like the fact that students copy content from sites and call them their own, instead of writing their own, or the fact that some illegally download software for their computer. A lot of people have some quite biased opinions of the youths interest for computers, for example the fact that a lot of people say that games with violence and blood make kids some sort of violent hooligans and that all of them are going to become murderers. When people that have no idea of what games actually are, and never even touched a console or a computer, sit and discuss these things in, for example, TV while making statements that games are all bad for the kids childhood and then flash a copy of a game like Postal II (A game that’s
	only based on killing. No story or plot at all that’s worth mentioning.) as an example of the games that the kids play, you become quite irritated as a gamer. Games are for entertainment, then that there are some black sheep in the many titles that are made each year is unavoidable. There are a lot of games in a lot of genres, which can be fun, mindwrestling, exciting and captivating, but the worried mothers can only see the “bad” games, because they’re the only ones that are shown in the newspaper, where you can read headlines like: “Boy robs bank. He plays Counter Strike in his spare time. I mean, that’s like saying that a 90% of all the people that die of brain injuries have eaten carrots, which means that’s the cause of death. There’s some that say that spending too much time with a video game or
computer when you grow up can affect your imagination in a negative way. They believe that the kids themselves aren’t able to think on their own or use their imagination in a creative way.Makes some sense, but in most games you actually have to think hard to beat it. There’s even been some research in how fast action-packed fames actually increase the child’s reflexes. What I mean is that it is wrong to blame games, when they’re completely harmless. Nevertheless you should still follow the age limit of the games, so that you won’t let your five year old son sit down and play some Grand Theft Auto.

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Writers: Dennis Häggquist (nv06-06@park.se).
HTML by: Joakim Strom Ramén (te05-02@park.se).