Life Lessons

It should be no surprise to hear that I spent a large percent of my childhood(and to a much lesser extent, my current life) playing video games. And while I’ll fully admit that the time wasted in front of the screen could’ve probably been put to better use elsewhere, I didn’t exactly come out with nothing for all the effort I put in. So here’s a list I’ve came up with showing all the wonderful things I’ve learned from playing games:

Travel Skills – This is probably the only thing useful that came out of playing World of Warcraft all those years. Namely, map reading skills and how to travel via public transportation. I shouldn’t be surprised I guess, the DC metro map is like child’s play compared to the monstrosity that are the flightpaths for WoW.

Money Management – Video Game: Save money, buy giant sword. Real Life: Save money, buy furniture?

Vocabulary – Mostly terms related to medieval armory… but it did come in useful during my SATs!

Musical Skills – Rock Band.

Motor Skills – Various hand-eye coordination skills. Not as useful as one would think.

Typing Skills – Back in the day when voice chat wasn’t as prevalent in games, typing was the only way to talk to people online. Faster typing = less death by goblin hordes. It was a pretty good incentive to learn how to type fast. Unfortunately it was also an incentive to get people to start typing like they’re missing a chromosome.

Social Skills – You wouldn’t think so, given the bad rap that video games have for creating anti-social basement-dwellers, but I would argue the correlation goes in the other direction. For me, gaming is very much a social activity. Almost all of my favorite games involve some kind of multi-player. This is especially true for MMOs (although I don’t play anymore), which is all about the teamwork and building social relationships.