Research paper for school: Is Online gaming beneficial?

Hello! I'll throw my 2 cents in here as well hope it helps, I'm gonna be throwing ideas you might want to consider and expand upon while researching this topic, the examples can be found easily aso you can cite and reference:

1) Games are beneficial to the learning process and have in fact been used to incentivise learning way before they hit mainstream appeal, you can always look at the edutainment game genre while it never was massively popular it's a prime example of games being used as learning tools. On the other side and on a higher level of education the Simulator genre was always and keeps being used to learn, flight simulators are used to train pilots as well as military simulators (putting these into the game category can be debatable but depending on the definition of games and the fact that even these sims have fail states). You can easily find examples of this and articles to add citing and referencing.

Of course we have to bring minecraft up when talking about games as education, minecraft with its massive appeal has in fact been used in schools (you can also find examples of this for citing purposes), the complexity and the deceptive simplicity of minecraft helps people with different skills, from problem solving, spacial interpretation, responsiveness, creativity,logic and workflow. Another real life example coding. Minecraft has in fact been used to tech the basics of coding.

Coding is a big part of games and we shouldn't disregard the modding scene, modding can be a great way to get into gaming and to learn coding. Modding is a great method to tie coding with fun result and an instant look at what you have created since you don't have to build the engine and interactions from the ground up, you are just modifying an existing part. Modding has spawned a few interesting softwares that are meant for education in which the whole coding process is simplified by modules that you can drag and drop to create simple but functional games, while teaching the basic of mechanics, logic and coding.

2) Here you can work on the minecraft example, minecraft has increased in popularity in schools and with teachers as well as students, of course while every game can reinforce a skill, not every game is suited for schools. One of the main attributes a game needs to have in order to have school appeal is be a creative sandbox, so games like minecraft where you can interact with the world and modify it at will are gonna be more suited for this. Another important aspect to consider is user content. When users can create their own levels or designs this greatly influences creativity and as a result their value as edutainment.
Another examples besides minecraft are : Little Big Planet, Mario Maker and Scribblenauts, Terraria.

3) Video games in general and specially helps us with lots of skills, like spacial skills, perception skill, reflex, creativity and one of the most important is response and frustration management. Video games at their core are a challenge and a contest as such losing is a big part of gaming and one has to learn to respond properly to frustration in order to overcome the challenge, these is specially evident in online multiplayer competitive games, where frustration and inability to deal with it lead to anger and BM as well as toxicity which in turn makes the likeliness of winning go down. There's been studies regarding online game psychology you can use to back this up) (Psychiatry and Psychology has been using games for year as a therapeutic technique with kids)

4) There is no correlation between video games and real life violence or consequences, fantasy doesn't translate to reality, the hypodermic needle theory has been long disproved and the psychology of gaming can back this up,( there's lots of studies out there that back this up and also show that violence has decreased with the increase of popularity or the release of violent mainstream video games like GTA, while causation has yet to be proved on that point, the link between negative consequences derived from gaming has been disproved)

5) Well whatever i could say here would be anecdotal and subjective, hardly of any value for a serious study unless you conducted a survey with a considerable sample size. But what i can say is that in these cases the links with bad or good effects on your life are tied to more important and engrossing events, and the relations with one another are interchangeable within media. For example the supposed "addiction" video games cause have more to do with the persons inability to stop playing or their personal tendencies rather than the media, this person would get just as engrossed or consumed by reading or tv if games weren't available this making games the medium not the reason.

6) The future of gamins is clearly VR and you can make a book on this topic, so i would recommend expanding on it, the application of VR far surpasses gaming itself, the level of immersion VR provides can be relaxing and therapeutic. (you can find some more eloquent stuff on this easily) VR has also been used to create experiences out of the gaming scene and the mainstream adoption of VR depends on it being adopted by other industries.

Well I hope this helps out and leads you in the right direction, good luck!!