Is gaming useful or harmful for children?

Of course it is good. However, moderation is still the key here.

It’s an interesting question. I have two anecdotal cases that pertain. The first is my kids. They got hooked on video games when they were young…8 or 9. They loved them. They were competitive and it entertained them. But they did get addicted to them. Then one day, they realized they were bored. Even new games didn’t help. All they were doing for entertainment was sitting and playing video games. They started asking me what I did when I was a kid for entertainment. Things like playing sports or riding bikes or building forts with friends had never occurred to them. They tried them and that was pretty much the end of gaming. My take was that the video games, while fun and exciting, kept them from living life and trying new things.
The second anecdotal case was at one of my previous jobs. One of the young guys that worked for me was only about 22. He made something like 5 reportable errors in 3 months. He was a smart kid and we had spent some money on training him. So he went to the psychologist for an evaluation to see if a cause for the poor performance could be found. The result was interesting. The psychologist indicated that there was a new phenomenon they were seeing. Younger people are raised in a world where everything is flash. Computers, video games, tv shows…all of them provide input during our development. They help train our brains. But what they were doing is training our brains to only be able to focus on something for a very short period of time. He said that this younger generation could flit from task to task all day long and be perfect. But if asked to concentrate on something for more than a few minutes, their concentration would waver and mistakes would be made. All the mistakes with my employee were of that sort. Start into a procedure and have periods of waiting for a system to respond for example, and he would lose focus and misposition a valve or skip a step or something that caused a problem.

Much gaming is positive, or at least neutral.

But anything can be taken to excess and become problematic.

In my case, games definitely made me much more interested in most school subjects, and made me a much better and more practiced student, because they had gaming applications for me, and I became more interested in understanding history, how things worked, I had uses for math, etc.

I find it insane for any parent to complain about kids being online or gaming, when THEY are the ones who make it possible. They don’t restrict their internet usage. They are the ones who buy the kids the games.

Good for your finger/hand movement. But, not good for your eyes.
LOL!

Boardgames don’t generally hurt the eyes (maybe unless you play in the dark…).

@Zaku. Obviously. It’s a board game, not a game in the screen(video games)