I have been into gaming ever since I can remember, way back when floppy disk was still widely used and Neopets was still a thing. My parents, or any parents on this matter would always point out that nothing good ever comes out of playing video-games. In fact, if you develop fever or any types of abnormal condition, according to our parents, this is because of too much exposure from the computer screen.
I do not blame them from having these kinds of impression since they were not exposed to the full market and the word ‘gaming’ is just all about fun. But is it? Gaming has changed and influenced me on a lot of things. Hereby are the top five skills that has not only helped me in the gaming community but also in reality.
Goal Setter
When you start out in any RPG game, you always have this main mission. Walk around the map and you may get a side-quest or additional objectives to either influence the ‘happy’ ending of the main mission or could benefit you while working towards the main mission. Yes, the game creates the objectives for you but in reality, for you to function daily you need to have goals that are generated and identified by you.
You should have a main mission life – your ultimate goal. You also need daily objectives to get you through the day, which makes you a day closer to your goals. At times, challenges comes while you are working about your daily objectives and that could be considered your side missions where it’s optional, but accomplishing it will greatly give you an advantage towards achieving your main mission. This isn’t an easy skill because you have to dig deep within yourself. You have to understand what motivates you, what keeps you going and be ready for challenges ahead.
Strategic Planning
I have recently played Patapon where it was a different level of gaming for me since you need to go by the music rhythm while harmonizing it with the beat of the drum and hand-and-eye coordination; because you have to follow a pattern to get a certain action to be successful. Hardcore and even casual gamers would love to have this kind of challenge because it stimulates planning and strategy.
You will have to analyze what worked and what didn’t. This skill is vital when you get thrown in a foreign environment where you have to know the ropes first. So you would’ve have to figure out what to do first; what will happen when I do this? What are the possible consequences when I do it differently. We are so free to experiment and design our own action plans because we now know how to perceive whether it will yield us positive or negative results.
Dealing with Failure
It is truly impossible for a gamer to complete a story on their first try without even dying once! Take Dark Souls II, it takes a lot of patience and tolerance and improvising to get the job done. Life will not give you everything in a silver platter. In fact, life in the Philippines is so hard – just getting any Government IDs gives you a bloody headache. At times, you have to come back multiple times because of lacking requirements just because they weren’t clear on it in the first place. At work, when one thing bad happens – everything else will follow. Murphy’s Law, folks! So it actually takes a lot of perseverance to not get carried away by these frustrations and making it worse.
Physical Hand-Eye Coordination
Games like Bioshock, The Witcher and Dishonored 2 needs a little bit of extra attention because of the fact that you need to gather resources to aid you in surviving combat by means of collecting healing potions, creating bombs, having ammo to defeat enemies and at times, very critical, to let you progress on the story. It is kinda frustrating when you can’t open a certain door because you need a certain key where you can definitely need to locate it in an open world! Not only you have to be sharp in finding these fine details within the limits of your purchased TV monitor but you have to correctly press the face buttons to evade that critical sword slash or to deflect that bullet.
In Dota 2 words – you need to have fast hands. This is particularly handy in driving, you need to be attentive to see all vehicles in either side. Especially with despicable public vehicle drivers that drives around mindlessly. You get to immediately see motorcycles coming up behind you so you can avoid accidents or when you walk around in downtown and you feel like you are being followed. That takes skill to detect that someone is following you or eyeing you and hand coordination kicks in by grabbing your bag in a guarded manner making them aware that you are aware and thus, discouraging them by engaging further. These situations needs quick judgement and we have that in the bag!
Less Presumptuous
When we first meet strangers, we become guarded because we don’t know them. We immediately judge them just because they are vulgar, annoying or weird. A special skill that I learned in my gaming years is – each one of us will always have a backstory that made us who we are at this point. Persona 5‘s Akechi Goro started out as an ally but was later found out to be otherwise, I started hating him for it but a backstory was revealed and it melted my heart in an instant.
Way back I played a campaign mission in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and played Arthas Menethil where he wanted to save his country from the Undead but because of that selfless love he became the Undead itself bearing the Frostmourne. Both tragic but it brought about a mistake where you judged them preemptively. It’s nowhere near right for us to label someone just because they are what they portray us. There will always be a backstory and it’s one of their treasures. So these people will consider you a great deal if they share such story with you and you should take care of it like a bar of gold inside your heart and thoughts.
