[Updated!] 5 6 things gaming has taught me:
- Pay attention to details!
In many adventure games, finding hidden or special items sometimes comes down to solving puzzles or noticing an alternate path that leads to (potentially) a room full of treasure. In first-person shooters (FPS), you get paid handsomely if you can notice a tiny movement in a distant window, or a shadow behind a crate. The lesson is basically that the details often matter. They may not be entirely crucial (you can often forgo those special treasures or take on a few extra deaths/less kills), but life’s more fun with details. They are significant. This brings me to my next point:
- Be discerning about what is actually significant.
Do I really need the extra gold from completing every quest? Will catching all the Pokémon really be worth my while? How much do I really want that bunker on the map? There are objectives in games, and in life, and not all are necessarily meaningful. If the point of a deathmatch is to simply get more kills faster, why capture a particular point on the map? Especially if it’s hard to defend once you take it—you’ll be putting yourself in an exposed position, in harm’s way, for no real/actual advantage. Life is like this. Some things are worth the risk in chasing, seeking, and obtaining. Others may seem important, but panning out (perhaps during a killcam?) and a little critical thinking will expose these “goals” as mere distractions. Be careful where you invest yourself.
- Good players generally aren’t team players. Great ones are.
Everyone has had that one Pokémon they beef up way more than the rest, simply because they like that one the best, or it was their starter. Likewise, there are often stellar killers on some teams in FPS games that are one-man wrecking crews, racking up the bulk of their “team”‘s points. The Lone Wolf archetype generally conflicts with the Team Player. Simply put, weaker teammates will drag you down. They give away your position, or draw enemy fire, or fail to watch their corners, etc…. But, in real life and in video games, to do truly amazing and win every time, you must do amazing and win as a team. This goes for everything, from a project team at work to your Battle Tower team in Pokémon, to your squad in Call of Duty. You can have the best kill : death ratio of all your friends, but this doesn’t guarantee anything for your win : loss (see mine, at ~1.3 K:D and ~0.9 W:L).
- Plan ahead.
With how gamers are portrayed on the media, you’d think games were a braindeadening hobby of dumb people doing dumber things. Anyone who thinks this has never spoken to Herman Chan about Pokémon teams. They’ve probably also never played Metal Gear Solid, or planned out how to clear out a room full of enemies with twelve bullets left. You can shave a few moments off your reaction time if you are already anticipating the pending action. Sure, you can go through matches without much forethought, sprinting around like an idiot in the open as cannon fodder. Or you can make the conscious decision to think ahead and end up ahead. Good planning is reacting in advance!
- Fight or flight? Back down or be put down?
Many times, our instinct is to dig our heels in and fight out a grudge match with an opponent. Be it about pride, ego, or an overestimation of one’s ability to take on an entire squad alone, we all have our reasons for refusing to back down. This is usually what happens just before you get outdone, outgunned, or outmaneuvered. This kind of stubbornness/tunnel vision never makes any sense when you think for a bigger picture, about the current situation. Simply put, if the odds are stacked against you, you can either make an epic (but fatal) last stand, or you can slip off to get a second encounter, and hope that the tables have turned in your favour by then. Adapting this to real life, you often need to make snap decisions for the immediate situation, but remember the big picture. Consider the long run as you decide for the moment.
- [Update] Never get complacent.
This is especially true in FPS. There are really only two kinds of high scoring players: campers and stalkers. Campers use one aspect of the environment/map to their advantage, staking out a good spot and preying on unwary passer-bys (pass-byers? pass-buyers? passer-bis?). These people can get some sick scores, since they mostly just abuse one bottle-neck or cheap trick. If the opponents aren’t completely senseless, they eventually decide to gang up/sneak up on this one camper and take him out. Then there are stalkers, who sneakily track down enemies and off them as opportunity allows. These players are forced to out-think, out-sneak, and only rarely out-gun their opponents. These are also the ones who inevitably end up constantly on the move, so that they are never in one place too long. They do better in the long run, trust me.
And as for anyone who tells you you can’t learn from video games, you can tell them a true student can learn from anything. Wisdom is wisdom, regardless of origin. *validates own gaming addiction*