How playing MMORPGs can improve real life skills
Playing games is fun. Online games earned their rightful spot as a platform for communication, finding friends and even love among like-minded people. Enjoying the visuals, mastering your mechanics, solving tricky puzzles, diving into intriguing stories and uncovering mysteries between the countless lines of dialogues is what engages millions of people who choose rather to live multiple lives, albeit in virtual universes. We play games to escape reality, and to reconnect with it again.
Yet those who occasionally find themselves spending time in front of the monitor to relax, still have to advocate their passions. “It’s just a distraction”, “it’s not important” and “you don’t achieve anything meaningful by playing games” kind of claims are juggled by those supposedly mature and serious. In order to report why gaming isn’t a mere waste of time or a bad habit, one just needs to accept the idea that learning can and should be fun.
Be smarter
Playing games makes you better at visual tasks and faster at learning to perform them. Forced to rapidly process all sorts of sensory information to act accordingly, gamers show superior reaction time to non-gamers.
When one actively explores virtual 3D environments, navigation gets easier in both games and real world, which is because your brain is prompted to develop existing neuron connections and create new ones, in particular affecting your hippocampus by increasing its size. The latter boosts the power of your memory, allowing you to capture memories faster and enabling them easier to recover.
Another important aspect is that skills once gained from gaming persist over the course of life, may be helpful at preventing dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other deteriorations to the brain function.
Failing is learning
Being able to fail without instant and severe consequences makes games a perfect learning grounds. Failure is a part and parcel of the learning process. In virtual worlds, you happen to face failures quite often, as well as to rise again for new attempts. Thus it gets easier to accept failure, recognize its necessity and build on the inevitability of missteps in everyday life. Grinding your ability to see through the problem disciplines you to be persistent which is a really important life skill.
Communicate
Playing with other people pushes you to communicate with them, predict their behaviour to make accurate decisions, learn the structure of human relationships and principles of the hierarchical organization of clans and parties, try different social roles and coordinate to address various tasks set by the games we play.
Theoretically, you can play games solo, but at most times you’re incentivized to join forces with others to achieve complex goals. Why would they then be called massively multiplayer games, right? You need to express your thoughts quickly and in an accessible manner, mastering your typing skills and working on your speech along the way. Getting better results in games by improving your communication skills will help with your speech anxiety. Besides, learning other languages while playing is put on the whole other level when you always naturally have game-related topics of discussion.
Finally, extending your usual social circle with people of different cultures and ages is universally beneficial.
Hire or be hired
When constantly communicating with people you get a better grip at understanding the way they think, which propagates outside gaming. If you have ever encountered how applications for higher ranked clans are addressed, you learn to present yourself more effectively which can be useful when polishing your real life job application. On the other hand, holding an HR position in a large reputed clan allows you to practice at getting a feel for possible candidates, doing background checks, weighing all the pros and cons of an applicant and accurate designating.
Become a leader
Taking responsibility for the success of raids or clan activities gives you place to work on your managing skills. Moreover, your allies being of different kinds of unfamiliar with you and each other push you to be an even better leader. And all of this in real-time and with instant feedback. Some games like Lineage 2 let you lead up to 200–300 people so your commands should be clear, precise and often immediate. Manipulating your image and cultivating your authority are desirable capabilities for any virtual and real world. Moreover, in games your experience is more likely to be accounted for because of low level of prejudice, so you can work on defending your position based solely on your expertise.
But being a good leader won’t make your clan the best by itself. Promoting your brand will help. To achieve that, you will have to become efficient at delegating responsibilities, experiment with subordination, build consistent and fair reward and penalty systems, become a master at advertising and persuading.
Get rich
Any MMORPG will force you to become better at making money, alas the virtual currency. Managing your funds, looking for opportunities to sell something at higher price, finding uncommon but profitable occupations, studying different market’s efficiency are skills that can be easily employed outside of the virtual world.
Anything else?
Diligence is very necessary for any MMO if you really want to get at. Grinding through hundreds of boss raids and daily quests will temper patience. Or will push you to get better at planning: after all, we’re all in it to relax. So effective strategizing will come to allow you to get to your goals faster and with more glitter along the way. Situations when something doesn’t go with flying colors will improve your stress management skills.
If you try to go for new experience in games and analyse it afterwards, playing games can teach you a lot. It may sound cheesy, but the right approach can even get you a promotion. You only need to actually apply skills you can get from gaming to real life tasks in a meaningful way. Still want to call it a waste of time?
