Ms.

Santiago,

The topic based around Sean Rigbys paper is of interest to a lot of people and has been
debated for quite some time. The topic of his paper is based around whether or not the extended
use of video games is affecting the youth of today in regard to health as well as social life. I
personally have done a little research to gain a better understanding of the topic. With this
research I have found that in some cases children that were invested in a game became too
invested and died of different reasons typically involving sleep deprivation or lack of food.
Within his paper he speaks of how the drug dopamine is released into the blood system of the
body which gives a rush when you succeed at something. In other words, when you reach an
achievement in a video game, you want to keep going because you feel good due to dopamine
being released. His paper explains what dopamine is and shows how it can correlate to addiction
of playing video games. I feel he is on the right track in regards to speaking about this topic
because it can help his argument either for or against video games as a whole. Something that
makes his paper even more valid is a survey that was shown within his paper which took 2436
male and 2463 female youth between the ages of 10 and 15 years old. In this survey, the
psychological impact of video games was measured for each volunteer of the survey. From the
information that was given the main finding was that it was very hard to distinguish between
video games and other activities because they both release dopamine into the system. This
overview of the survey was helpful as it gave a little more insight on what the effects are on these
younger people. In another section of the paper Sean explained how through research some of
these children that are playing video games every waking minute are more likely to have mental
instability not specifically due to the games but due to self-isolation from others. In other words,
people that lack a social life and play video games tend to have more violent tendencies than
those that are more socially active. One of the topics that really struck me as interesting was that
for toddlers that saw or played video games early on could base their emotions later in life
around those early experiences. Basically saying that toddlers that watched violent games early
on sometimes had tendencies of becoming angry or were unhappy. I feel that the paper that has
been represented has a very good topic to discuss and I feel that Sean has a great start for the
final product. He has obviously done his research and shown that he understands the topic
thoroughly speaking of various surveys and the drug dopamine. All of which have a place in his
paper and solidify the argument that he is trying to portray to his audience.
Sincerely,
John Iannacone