All work with no play makes John a dumb boy, all play no work makes John dumber. This is what our parents and their parents taught them and all throughout the decades and centuries, the traditional view of playing games is that its childish, useless and done just for fun and that nothing good will ever come out of it except that it is done by children as part of growing up.
Enter the 20th and 21st century with the advent of the internet, personal computers, mobile devices and gaming consoles, playing games has now evolved online. Parents frequently lament that their children are addicted to video games online and majority of psychologist say that it is not healthy for a child to play video games for long periods of time. Just recently there was a news item that a teenager died because of playing on a game console for more than 20 hours straight.
So is playing games, especially sitting whole day on a hickory furniture and playing online games completely useless? If this is the case we should ban the playing of all games and ban all play for games free online sites. But such is not the case.
Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Instead of criticizing games and convincing children that they should stop playing games, we should look at the bright side and instead even considering cashing in on the gaming craze.
The completely none sense and useless game, plants vs. Zombie might not look like much when you play with it in your mobile device, but this completely non sense useless game became such a smashing hit that its maker PopCap also the maker of popular game “Bejeweled” was bought out by EA Games for $750 million. Another stupid game which is now a hit is “Angry birds” which has been the cause of much anger and ire of parents because their children cannot stop playing this “stupid” game. This seemingly simple game has raked in US$70 million in profit for its maker Rovio.
You might say these are corporations that made these games and that you could never rake in millions of dollars like these corporations, well consider the story of Ephren Taylor. Being a game fanatic at 12 years old he created video games. Then he went on to web design, and by the time he reached 17, his job-posting company, GoFerretGo.com, had grown to multi-million-dollar status. Now he runs City Capital Corporation, making him the youngest African-American CEO of any publicly traded company in history.
A 14-year old boy from Spanish Fork in Utah, created this year’s hottest free application for the Apple iPhone. Game designer, Robert Nay an eight-grader says, that he was able to design and develop the said application by doing his research at the Spanish Fork Public Library. In January 2011 his game “Bubble Ball” was downloaded for about 400,000 times as it edges Angry Birds as the number one free apps for the Apple iPhone. He might not have made any money out of it as of now, but I believe he is on his way there.
Games not only make you money, in September of 2011 online gamers stunned scientist by cracking the AIDS enzyme puzzle in just three weeks. Scientists has been working their asses off for the past 10 years to figuring out the structure of protein and enzymes that is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them. A microscope gives only a flat image, whereas pharmacologist insists that they need a 3-D picture that “unfolds” the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs. Scientist and AIDS experts have been stumped by this puzzle for a decade. A game called “Foldit” which is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — using a set of online tools was created by the University of Washington to help unravel this mystery. To the astonishment of the scientists, gamers who have no background in biochemistry produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks!
Gaming takes a second look although admittedly if done in excess may not be good, but it has its advantages, and we should not turn a blind eye towards it. That’s why I’m jumping in the gaming bandwagon by putting up my own free gaming site. I’m hoping to get a slice of the huge revenues of the gaming industry pie. So why don’t you head to www.playgamesonlineforfree.info right now and spend some time to play games online for free there? Who knows, you might just discover the cure of AIDS or find out how to search for life in other planets more effectively. As they say all work no play makes you a dumb boy.
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