Buzzin Games

Are online motocross games beneficial because they keep children from going out and attempting dangerous activities on their own?

Statistically speaking, children these days are involved in rather fewer knockabout accidents than were the kids of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Children’s natural adventurousness of children coupled with a more casual attitude towards supervision added up to a good deal of injury.

Whether dwelling in the countryside or town, children a few decades ago would naturally gravitate towards the least hospitable locations – whether building sites, quarries, deserted farm machinery barns, rubbish tips or railway embankments for their games. Like their counterparts in comics such as the Beano and Dandy, yesterday’s youngsters played with broken bicycles, home-made go-karts, and – if they could find any – abandoned or burnt out cars. In contrast, most of today’s children derive their thrills from online games, are escorted by parents from place to place and in large measure are quite understandably forbidden to wander off.

The sedentary nature of lives led by a sizeable majority of youngsters today causes concern among bodies such as the UK’s Department of Health. Three years ago, the European Youth Heart Study which compared 1,730 nine-fifteen-year-olds living in Estonia, Denmark and Portugal recently found that on average they took less than the recommended number of minutes of daily exercise.

Government targets set at the start of the Millennium for children’s levels of physical exercise are still not being met.  At the opposite end of the spectrum are the teenage skateboarders and fans of rollerblading who experience broadly speaking around 30,000 accidents annually in the UK, according to the most up-to-date statistics available. These two outdoor activities lead, by and large to mainly minor accidents, with gratifyingly few fatal ones.

Online, children can gain a taste of some sports that carry a seriously dangerous element, quite apart from the expense involved in practising them for real, such as snowboarding, speedway and motocross. And provided they get the recommended average 90 minutes of normal, running-around exercise through Physical Ed at school and games in the playground (as well as walking to and from school, if possible) then there’s no harm done!