I wonder why parents always like to pull the "video games will spoil the TV" argument when their children play on it? I've listened to this excuse since I was 8 or 9 years old, right up till the time I convinced him to buy us a PS1 (10 years later). Nope, the TV didn't get damaged whatsoever. I'll take a wild guess here; if the TV was operated nonstop for days, or even weeks, then probably you have a chance of damaging the TV. It's just your everyday wear and tear issue, nothing special. Heck, if your parents were the ones watching TV nonstop for hours and weeks, the same thing might happen as well. So no, games don't have any magical properties to destroy your TV. Unless the player is the one doing the destroying.

Discolouration is something that will appear if you strain your TV. I partially agree that because video games use a broad spectrum of colour, it might stress out one of the three colour bands (red, green, blue) that make up the images. But it's no more worse than running a DVD player on the TV. This problem was more pronounced with CRT TVs because the phosphor can wear out with prolonged use.

So why have some people seen this discolouration? It's due to wear and tear. There's no mystery to it. After all, kids tend to play games much, much longer than a typical TV watching session. During my younger days, I'd play Megadrive from 8.30am to 5pm on pretty much every weekend. Can you guess how long it was before the TV died?