Shooting Games

You wake up and you’re lying down in a war zone. Your aircraft has just crashed on a remote planet. Shots are being fired in your direction from people approximately 100 feet away from you. Next to you lie a shotgun, a pistol and a sniper rifle. You pick up the sniper rifle, but you have no ammunition. You quickly maneuver your way around the battlefield and find a box full of bullets. You load up your gun and take aim at your enemies. You decide which enemies are the biggest threat and kill them first. All this happens in the comfort of your home! Very engaging and thought provoking, don’t you think? This is a small scale example of many modern shooting games that involve using critical thinking skills and important cognitive functions. These games involve you at a level that is almost reality. Choosing what cover to take, which path to maneuver through to find bullets, and choosing which gun best fit’s the situation that you’re in, all involve important critical thinking skills. It puts in a sense of priority in the person, teaching them to make choices in life that are according to priority. The cognitive skills are involved when the game requires you to press a series of buttons in order to perform specific actions and navigate your way around the battlefield. Just imagine moving one joystick in an up-and-down movement to move forward and backwards, then another joystick to turn right and left. On top of that, imagine pressing the right joystick to fire your gun and pressing the “a” button to jump and pressing the “b” button to throw a grenade, then activating your shield with the left second trigger button. If we engage our kids in playing these games, I think we can rest assure that our future generations will think in much a much faster pace.