Long hours playing video games can negatively affect your child's performance in school if he's preoccupied with video games. He can fail to work at his optimum level because he's exhausted from a late night of video game playing. If your child devotes more than one or two hours a day to television or video games, he may have trouble falling asleep, have problems paying attention and have lower test scores than other children who don’t spend as much time in front of a television or video game console.