This is a reflection paper that provides a brief account of my previous undertaken research on the ‘The Effect of Online Games on Children Social Behavior, Personality, and Health’. This paper aimed at adding to existing literature on the effects of online games on the behavior, personality and health of children with particular focus on books, internet searches, newspapers and journals. The findings in this research did not contradict what I expected to find out when carrying out my own research. This reflective paper is a presentation of what I felt and a personal perspective about my research.
Having done previous research on this subject, the brochures gave me reasoning behind addressing this subject. It was not hard finding the right pictures that would be useful in my study. To some extent, these brochures provided me with helped me to reveal the feasibility and the usefulness of this study with regard to the images used. I figured out that I needed pictures to make the audience understand the basis of my research and I enjoyed incorporating them in my investigation.
Practically, in every aspect of life that is being influenced by technology, there are so many questions with regard to the effects of technology particularly online video games. The questions on the effects of online video games have been developed around the themes of personality, behavior and health of children. In my research, I began by making phenomenological observation of the aspect of video games and looked at the current statistics of its users with particular emphasis on children. With this approach, I figured out that it would be possible to draw conclusion easily on how online video games affect the behavior, personality and the health of children and the attitudes one should have when relating to them.
In composition, video games can be understood from three basic components of the keyboard, exposure to the screen on which the game is displayed and a microcomputer. Other variants like a joy stich or a light detector which is the form of a gun which help the user detect what region he should be pointing at. I found most of the articles very interesting and very informative which propelled my desire to go further into investigating the effects of video games on children. Although there were many ideas I agreed to from the presentation of these authors, I would like to disagree with the results of Dwerk & Modlen (2005). These authors claim that video games have the positive impact of increasing team work, bonding and provide solutions to a game problem.
Let us take for us instance, I video game that is centered around violence, how is the violence in this video game promoting team work, bonding and bringing solutions to a game? Instead, such a game would cause children to be quick tempered and in fact team up against one another. I think this aspect of promoting bonding and working together should be revised in the future analysis of the same topic. Apart from this fact, I agree to all the positive and negative effects of online games on children as discussed by all these authors.
When planning to write this research, I must agree that I had a difficult experience choosing a topic to focus on. Upon finding a topic to write on, I also found it tasking to take one a stand on whether online video gaming is best or should be discouraged for use by children. I must agree that choosing a topic is the most difficult task when needed to perform a research. Most times students complain about having to write assignments that focus on a specific topic assigned to them by their instructor but in real sense having to choose a topic on your own is even harder. When I finally got the topic to focus on, I had so many ideas I needed to write about that I become stressed and overwhelmed. I am used to designing papers that the author takes a stand but because of the many ideas I had, I decided to address both sides of the research. As stated in most articles in the library database with claims that ‘students experience confusion and uncertainty’, I completely agree to this quote.
Although I now have a clear understanding of how to maintain certainty and avoid confusion, I can say the experience of turning ideas into an actual paper is an interesting experience. To come up with this research, I had to write down every idea that came to my mind at whatever time during the day and once I had a draft of what I wanted to incorporate in paper, I trimmed down the number of factors into an a pleasant paper. For me, it was never a great deal to have a bibliography included in my paper because instructors have always insisted on quality papers for submission.
While conducting this research, another problem that seemed to affect me was the method of acquiring data for use as information in my research paper. I used online journals most of the time to acquire information because I felt they were valuable sources. Even though I avoided looking for sources in the library, library sources could also be beneficial but it was somehow stressful and overwhelming to acquire information from the library. Now I have an understanding why most students avoid using library databases. When comparing my final paper with the rest of my classmate’s paper, I realized that my research was more planned although I could relate to having suffered impatience which was easy to contradict as well. Although I got overwhelmed with the amount of information, I did not search for articles unplanned and haphazardly. One thing I learnt in my research process is acquiring planning from developing an outline. What an outline does is to help a researcher narrow down the wide amount of information he has into specific topics he would wish to have on his paper. In the future, I will adopt of a culture of using an outline that should reveal how I will structure my final research. An outline also helps in making the researcher sift through important information when working on a deadline.
There were no limitations in this study because as a researcher all I had to do was search for material in online databases and use previous literatures to structure an individual study. My concepts and observations in this research have led into maintaining a neutral argument. I have had my hands on both the positive and the negative which I believe is educationally correct. In turning my ideas into actual arguments in written form, I feel that I tried my level best. However, the problem to me was picking a focus in a topic that is needs to maintain a neutral stand. It was hard maintaining a focus in such a vast topic but all in all I enjoyed reading my own research very much. This process allowed me to think critically, help me reflect on my childhood and help parents in deciding whether their children should engage in online gaming activities. I am now able to write better researches in the future after this process.
