Videogames can sometimes have something of a bad reputation. Some people think they promote bad behaviour, or they make young people stay indoors rather than going out and living a real life.
The truth, however, is that some videogames can actually improve your real life. There are many skills and pieces of knowledge that can be learned, and you may be much more equipped to face the real world than you realise. Read on to find out more.
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Learn Personal Accountability
When you play a good videogame, it will challenge you. You might feel frustrated, even stressed when you are playing because you can’t seem to get past that challenge. But when you do, you will have learned an excellent lesson about perseverance, which is a skill that will help you greatly in your personal life and your career.
More than that, though, you will have learned about personal accountability. Beating those videogames challenges is all about focusing on what you are doing and controlling the situation around you to make it a better, more positive one for you.
This lesson does need some thinking about, and it’s not something that’s immediately obvious, but once you understand it, you can carry it over into your real life from your gaming one, and improve everything you do.
Dealing With People
People can be difficult to deal with, especially for introverts who are more than happy to stay at home and play videogames. This is, of course, less of a problem for extroverts who play videogames, but for those who prefer their own company, the games they play are an excellent outlet.
Yet not all videogames are solo pursuits. Some are made explicitly for multiplayer action, and others are single player but with the added chat function should you want to make use of it. If you want to learn some essential life lessons from your videogames, it is highly recommended that you do make use of this function and interact with other players when you can.
Doing this will help you to learn how to talk to other people in a non-threatening setting. After all, you’re not actually with them, and you can leave the chat at any time you want to. This will enable you to learn how to deal with people so that when you meet them in person, perhaps when you have to go shopping for something important like food, clothes, rims and tyres for your truck, or anything else, you can speak well and explain precisely what it is you want.
Gain Problem Solving Skills
No matter what you do in life, or what you choose to do if you’re still trying to figure out which direction to go in, there will be problems to solve. There will be problems to solve in your personal life, in your career, in your hobbies, and anything else you can think of. They might be significant problems that seem insurmountable, or they might be small problems that should technically be easy to deal with. No matter what they are or what they lead to, dealing with them is exactly what you’ll need to do, and this is where your gaming will stand you in good stead.
For those who don’t have a background in videogames and problem solving, even those tiny problems mentioned above might seem impossible to solve; they just don’t know where to start. When you are a gamer, though, you’ll be facing challenges and problems every day, and you’ll have a strategy in mind as soon as you know there is yet another one to overcome (whether it’s real life or within a game).
On top of this, videogames are an excellent way to exercise your brain, thanks to the problem solving requirements of so many different games. Keeping your brain active is crucial for good mental health and, as you get older, it’s good for ensuring your memories are kept intact, and you are less susceptible to degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Far from rotting your brain as some people like to suggest, playing videogames is enhancing it.
Stress Relief
As wonderful as life can be with all its adventure, excitement, and opportunities, it can also be stressful. As a society, we are working harder and longer than ever before. We don’t take the breaks we should and we’re always pushing ourselves to do more and more and more. This can lead to stress, also known as ‘burnout’.
Rather than being a small problem that a day off can cure, someone who has been diagnosed with stress has a recognised mental health disorder. Stress can make everything seem completely overwhelming and you’ll find it difficult to do anything, let alone the important things that need to be done. It can lead to depression and anxiety among other mental health problems. Then there are the physical problems associated with stress; high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, insomnia, and many more conditions.
If you feel yourself getting stressed, upset, and overwhelmed about things around you or tasks you need to complete, it’s a good idea to try to de-stress before the problem becomes too difficult to deal with. For some people, videogames are the ideal outlet, allowing them to focus on something other than whatever it is they are feeling stressed about. If your mind is taken away from your problems and you are fully immersed in another activity (such as videogames), your body can calm down and de-stress. By the time you finish your game and have to start thinking about your problems again, they will often seem much smaller, and sometimes a solution has presented itself when you weren’t paying attention.
Meet New People
When you’re a child, it’s easy to meet new people and instantly become friends with them. As an adult, this is much more difficult. We’ve become, over the years, much more cynical, and rather than just taking someone at face value like we would have done when we were small, we try to analyse everything and everyone. Making friends is much harder than it ever was before.
Having something in common with someone else is an excellent way to start a friendship, and videogames are an ideal starting point when you meet someone new. You’re going to want to have friends who have the same likes and dislikes as you, and if they also enjoy the same videogames as you do, this could be the ideal basis to start a friendship. In fact, you may even have already ‘met’ through your games via the chat feature, helping you to a good start.
Adults need to have friends just as much as children do, so using anything to help find those good friends is crucial, and videogames fit the bill perfectly.
Better Multi-Tasking
In general, multi-tasking is not a good thing. Rather than being fully focused on one chore or task until it is complete, we rush from one thing to another, doing many jobs to a lower standard. You may think you are being more productive, but in reality, you are setting yourself up for more work as you’ll need to re-do a lot of the tasks you were trying to complete at the same time as something else.
Yet sometimes, despite knowing this, multi-tasking is the only way to get anything completed at all. This links back to our busy lives and how stressed we are. So, if we have to multi-task, we should be as good at it as we can be. Videogames help us to focus on both visual and auditory distractions at the same time, boosting our multi-tasking to the next level.
Conclusion
As with everything in life, moderation when playing videogames is key, but these games clearly do have some great benefits when it comes to real life situations.
