Pablo Luna
How many times were you forced to listen to someone rant about how much time you spend on video games lately? Especially if it’s an adult who has never touched a console or played a game before. Apparently, there’s been a rumor circulating that gaming has little to no benefit at all. It’s only a waste of time and a way to get yourself removed from reality, that’s what they always say. If only they could see how a gamer thinks and how they view and perceive the world around them thanks to gaming. Scientific research has already successfully proved the benefits of gaming when it comes to developing life skills, but how does a gamer go about developing those skills? Here is all the information you’ll need.
Hand-Eye Coordination
The most obvious skill that you can get out of gaming is hand-eye coordination. For example, when it comes to first-person shooter games, instead of spraying and praying, try to focus on getting as many headshots as you can. Such a simple goal can help you improve the accuracy of your wrist movements and increase the speed with which you react to your visual stimuli. The Next time a car appears in front of you out of nowhere, you won’t be the one getting t-boned, you can rest assured of that. What’s more, after a while of playing games, you’ll find that your hand and finger muscles have adapted to fast movements. If you ever decide to learn an instrument or software, you’ll have the advantage of being able to improve your speed at a faster rate than normal, in addition to the improved ability to memorize shortcuts, of course.
Social Skills
Gaming is an arena fertile with opportunities for developing people’s social skills, though you do have to have a certain awareness to be able to enhance those skills. First off, gaming puts you in touch with many people of all sorts from various backgrounds and cultures. If you keep an open eye for the patterns around you, you can understand how certain people tend to act. Though, be careful not to fall into the two deadly traps: generalization and stereotyping, and sometimes, racism. Second, by coming across the various types of people, you’ll be able to quickly understand who you’re dealing with in real life. Though video games allow people to craft their identity with the freedom that face-to-face interactions don’t provide, as fake as an identity might be, you can always learn from what people choose to portray about themselves.
Problem-Solving
Games, especially the good ones, are a place where problems are frequent and the solutions are, more often than not, quite elusive. Meaning, you have to get creative when it comes to finding your own solutions. How do you turn this into a useful skill? Well, the more problems you face, the better you’ll get at solving them efficiently, and this will automatically apply itself to your other life problems. The other way to develop the skill is to actively pay attention to the forums. According to the experts at I like cheats, forums, hacks, and cheats are guaranteed to improve your overall gameplay. By noting how the hacks work and by seeing how the people on the forums think, you’ll be subjecting yourself to new problem-solving approaches. A change of perspective is always good.
Planning
To improve your planning and organizing skills, all you need is to pay attention to how you approach a quest, a campaign, a game, or even a single opponent. Note how you do the following: locate and anticipate the threats around you, take into account your teammates’ actions, chart your movements through the maps, studying the game’s current META, and pick ambush spots and hideouts. When dealing with a big project with a lot of moving parts, you’ll find that you’re applying the same concepts and principles as within your gameplay, which can also be applied in real life. The more you remain actively aware, the more you’ll be able to purposefully transfer your skills.
After only a little while of applying the awareness and the techniques you’ve read about to your games and your life, you’ll get a feel of the true impact of video games. The fact of the matter is, some of those skills have already transferred and implemented themselves in your mindset. In other words, if you have been gaming for a while, you’ve definitely accessed many gains. Awareness only helps you to take the rate of improvement into your own hands and manually control it. If you could see how many skills you’ve unconsciously developed because of the time you invest in gaming, you’d be quite amazed, to say the least. Imagine what you could do if you had control over that skill set.
