Stop gaming and educate yourself man!

That’s eXactly what i’m doing right NOW…

After two tough posts about (my) mental health it’s time for something else again. While I know this post won’t get as much attention as the two previous ones, I don’t really care either. I’m doing what my gut says and today it says write something positive about your passion: Gaming! In my first post with this topic I wrote that you can develop really useful skills when playing videogames. Not only it’s fun as hell but you can also grow and develop as a person – isn’t that great? Again, this is no scientific paper or anything similar, I just write down what I experienced and gained over the years.

First let me state the obvious, in our modern, digitalised world you naturally gain some basic knowledge about software, networks, how to handle computers and similar stuff (ofc depending on what you play). I heard that’s great if you apply for jobs nowadays.
To elaborate my headline a bit I will talk about the genre shooter now. What is a shooter you may ask? Well, as the word already implies: you shoot people (or other creatures) and try to stay alive yourself. Ain’t that horrible, right? Well in real life this is really horrible but try to see the bigger picture and don’t focus on what you are actually doing there. As I said you want to stay alive while shooting other players (in case of a multiplayer shooter), that means you have to stay aware of your surroundings at all times. Someone can jump around the corner any minute and if he does you need to shoot him first. In order to do that you need a really fast reaction time. If you are playing with and against other people you probably need good communication and teamwork. Those are main points you develop while playing that genre. Also, eventually you start to analyse the enemies behaviour and predict where they come from. There are probably more things to gain but let me go to another genre.

Playing adventures gives you many advantages in life. In case you don’t know what adventures are: you basically advance in the game by solving the most divers riddles. Sometimes you need to find an unusual way to pull a stuck lever in an abandoned building or a guard in front of the factory needs to be distracted in order for you to sneak in. How are you gonna do that? In very good games you have more than one solution for those problems. How about hooking a dogs’ leash to the lever and throwing a ball far away to make the dog run very fast away from the lever in order to pull it (I made that up but there probably is a game where you have to do exactly that). “Ahh now I can use the ball I found at the beginning of the game and did not know where to use it“. There you have it, problem solving and creative thinking combined with weighing up and excluding all given possibilities. Honestly, I cannot count the times I read “problem solving capabilities” and “creative mind” in job descriptions.

Let’s get a little emotional know – shall we? Firstly, because I come to my favourite genre know and secondly because this section is about (sometimes emotionally hard) decisions you’ll face in (modern) role-playing-games. It starts with decisions “do you kill the murderer of a family of 4 and get a lot of money from the brother of the father who hired you to kill him or do you go to the police and hand him over like a hero would do (without getting any money)?” and ends up in very difficult to solve situations with no good or bad but only grey zones. Imagine this:
A wealthy individual asks you to find his wife and daughter who are missing for several weeks. During your investigation you find out that the people you have so search for suffered from domestic violence from you drunken contractor. Once you confront him with it he seems really sorry and quite miserable about what he did. Also, he opens up to you and tells you his wife gave birth after he raped her. Because of the world this game is settled in, this baby, however, is cursed and buried now as a zombie like creature that comes out at night. Do you kill it or try to release it from this curse to let it finally die? Once you find the wife and daughter do you send them back to your contractor, because you believe that he is sorry and will change or do you leave them be and tell the husband that they are dead somewhere in the woods? (the gamers among you probably know what game I am talking about btw).
This was only a rough wrap up of the situation but I think you see how hard it is to decide what to do there. Not only the decision itself is hard but thinking about the consequenses you will suffer on either side. When your contractor somehow finds out you lied to him and the two women are still alive somewhere, he will maybe come after you and try to kill you. This is a perfect example for learning to make difficult decisions and to live with the consequenses however they will unfold.

All of those mentioned skills are transferable to the real life and of course there is much more to learn and aquire. I probably will go over more skills in futures posts, because I don’t want to make the post too long. As you see it’s not only clicking and pressing buttons, you have to let your brain work either by reacting really fast and predicting or take you time and think things through, depending on the genre and the game.

I hope this post was enjoyable and could give you new perspectives on gaming.
Thanks for reading, peace.