Watered down, video games are just entertainment. If you are doing well with a game, it can be very relaxing and can remove stress. Though there are times that I have to quit a game and tell myself it is just a game and there is no reason to get so angry at a level or whatever.
Not all games are a waste of time after you remove entertainment value. Before I entered high school I couldn't care less about history, but then I started playing games like Age of Empires 2. I really liked reading about the history of the scenarios, especially since I then got to play out that history. One of my favorite campaigns of that game was the Holy Roman Empire one about Frederick Barbarossa.
I hated school because the majority of my teachers didn't do anything to make classes interesting, but when I took World History in high school, I was actually interested in the class because of all the historical type RTS games that I had played. I wanted to learn more about the history than the game actually provided. I actually did a large report, for that class, about Frederick Barbarossa. I would go as far as to say that if I didn't like writing stories so much, I probably would have been a History Major in college, instead of an English Major like I am now.
Though I could also say that video games(I would also put television and movies in on it) influenced me to be a writer. When I experience a great story in a game, it inspires me to write. It makes me want to write something different and new but try to make it more awesome. Same thing goes if I see story in a game go down a path I think is stupid. It makes me think that I could have written something better, so I start writing something that is even better.
It may not be better to everybody, but in my eyes it is better and pleases me. If I ever get anything published, I would be the type of author that wouldn't really care how readers feel about my writing (bad or good), though I would be the type of author that would write a separate book or make a statement on what something in one of my books means. I understand that something I write can have more than one meaning, but as far as I'm concerned, whatever I intend something to mean in my writing is the correct meaning of my writing, any other inference is crap. (Sorry, I was channeling anger I had accumulated from a Literary Criticism and Theory class in college.)
I would say that games can have a profound impact on the course of some peoples lives. The big one would be the people that actually go into the career of making games. If I went into the game industry, it would have to be writing stories for games, because I am horrible with math, computer coding, and other technical matters that would be involved.
