Many people try to demonize video gamers by claiming that video games make people violent, isolated and overall waste time by indulging in such activities. Well,I would like to counter these claims.

The first claim by people critical of video gamers is that violent video games make people violent themselves. This idea is perpetuated by people like Jack Thompson-an anti-game advocate who sites violent games as the cause of such horrible events like the Columbine shooting. This claim is quite simply false. People have been violent long before video games existed.

Hitler did not play video games yet he went on to become a mass murderer. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed terrible crimes due to the situation that they were in and not because they thought, "geez shooting people in video games is fun. I'm going to do it for real." Further evidence to support this claim up is the gun related deaths in America and Japan.

America, home to the Columbine massacre, has the highest number of gun related deaths. For every 100,000 people 15.24 citizens die. However, other countries like Japan take violent video games to the next level and have a greater cultural emphasis on games than America, whilst still possessing a substantially minute number of gun related deaths, only having 0.07 deaths per 100,000 people.

Clearly, violent video games are not the reason for the large amount of violence, otherwise there would be a virtual holocaust in Japan. I do not know what the cause of all this violence is but I can certainly tell you it is not violent video games.

The second claim is that people who play video games are usually people who just isolated themselves and in essence are loners. This is false because of two reasons. One, just because you play games does not mean that you do not have any social interaction with people outside of the game. Many people I have met online have partners, go to parties, and are very social. Many video gamers keep an appropriate balance between video gaming and their social life.

Secondly, practically all games nowadays have multi-player mode, thus, gamers do not really play alone. Through my personal experience and as many other gamers can relate themselves we have met many interesting people online that we could call friends or acquaintances. In video games, there is a lot of social interaction especially when people come together and play in a group like a clan.

World of Warcraft is definitely a highly social game because almost all of the players form clans to play with other people and some even form friendships. Nowyou may not care much for that game itself, butyou cannot deny that social interaction is taking place. A different kind of interaction perhaps, but still interaction none the less.

The third claim that video gamers are wasting their time and life by playing video games is just a false stigmatism of gamers. Playing video games is no more a waste of time then watching TV, partying or reading non-educational books. The reason why video games are not a waste of time is they serve to entertain you. Just like attending parties, watching TV, and reading books serve to entertain you.

Reading a book like Star Wars Path of destruction may be very entertaining but do not teach you anything of great importance like math, history, or philosophy. In fairness, the majority of books nowadays are more about romance, adventure or science fiction that just entertain and do not really teach that much. However, no one would usually dare say that is the case, but it is. Now of course I am saying the act of playing video games is not in essence wasting one's life.

If someone were to just fervently, play video games then that would be bad. Like anything else overindulgence can be dangerous, just like having an occasional drink is fine but going too far will of course be a problem. With that said if we can accept that watching TV, partying and reading non-educational books is not a waste of time then we can also agree that there is nothing wrong with playing video games.