Video Games vs. Obesity

Yes, the title isn’t a lie…I promise. You see I’ve played video games since I was around 3 years old. At that time, I was introduced to them through my mom and growing up I would play Super Mario brothers, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong on the Super Nintendo console. This ignited my desire to play video games, which is something I still do now, 15 years later. Therefore, when it came to this research topic, my idea was, “why not think first of something you love, then connect it to food”? Basically that’s how this came about.

Thankfully, I was never this bad with my habits while gaming, but this is the problem I see involving food and video games. People too often focus on the violence of video games. However, I see a much more prevalent threat that needs to be looked at which is how video games impact the diet of the average person. Even though they don’t seem like it, video games are the ideal advertising source since so many people play video games. While many aren’t likely to believe commercials and take what they say with a grain of salt, in my experience more people believe video games. Sports games are the most commonly used video game for this product placement since everything seems more and more realistic with the progression of each year. Furthermore, many of the things the athletes eat/drink in the game are what they are actually seen doing on the television during a game. For instance, the giant Gatorade, or smaller bottles of Gatorade are always seen in video games but are what every athlete gets when they are subbed out or during a timeout. It’s practically a tradition to see this.

Thus, if one can see it in real life, it heightens the credibility of the video games that are using the same tactics to endorse other things. And in turn, video games begin to have the same persuasive power seeing the real things. Perhaps my idea is a tad farfetched in the connection I drew earlier, but I still think the power of video games on the diet is something that needs to be focused on almost as highly as people choose to focus on their violence factor.