Games that teach you something you can use for real?

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I realized I've spent so many thousands of hours playing video games. You learn them, you get really great at them, you finish them, maybe you play them through a couple times, then you move on. And what have you gained? You've basically killed time with nothing to show for it. Those skills do not really translate to any real world application.

The same goes for reading novels. I read so many sci-fi and fantasy series, comic books, and then you move on to the next series and after a while the same plots are just getting regurgitated.

And, of course, everyone knows TV, movies and surfing the internet are just killing time.

I've come to realize that "killing time" is a form of incremental suicide. You only get one life. If you just want to turn your brain off and drift through a few hours, you have lost those hours forever. To some extent, I think there is a psychological need to "turn off" by relaxing in some way, and so video games, reading, tv, internet, can all help with that in moderation. But I decided I spent way too much time on that.

I realized if I added up the time I wasted doing these things, just think what I could have accomplished? With that in mind, I took up learning guitar and music theory. I play a game called Rocksmith.

I also took up chess. You could say chess is just a game, but it sure has stood the test of time. I also believe the lessons of strategizing, looking at your position from all angles, predicting your opponent's strategy, looking moves ahead, all has real-world application. I may be wrong, but I hope that as I become better at reading the chess board, I will also become better at reading real-world situations. It also has stood the test of time.

Anyway, I think learning music and chess both have greater extrinsic value than, say, getting great at Super Smash Bros. I could be wrong. But with this notion in mind, I am wondering what other games exist that have similar extrinsic value. Like games that teach coding and art and astronomy.

Ken

You'd be surprised, what you can learn from these.

Gaming is my main hobby, and has been for pretty much my entire life, my parents having got me started with the ancient 2600 console at around age 3, I'm told. Even all these years later I still have all the games from that thing, which are actually kinda scattered all over the place at the moment and have been used recently; this should say something about how into gaming I am. And I sure as heck dont just do retro games.

What's interesting though is where the whole thing took me, what it taught me, and what it let me accomplish later on.

The first thing that it's given me is, to me, by far the most obvious: coordination, and reflexes. I'm extremely coordinated at this point, even when just typing, someone I know once described my typing as producing "a constant flat sound instead of alot of individual taps", because it's REALLY fast once I get going. But beyond that my reflexes and reaction speed are downright ridiculous at this point. I do alot of competitive gaming (fighting games, usually) which definitely requires speed, and speed is my central advantage in basically.... everything. I've not met an opponent that can match me in sheer speed in years. And of course, neither speed nor coordination apply JUST to gaming, but they also apply to many other things. Even something like personal safety when driving; that hyper-quick reaction time is just the thing that might save you from what could have been a terrible accident, and I've had a couple of near-misses in my time that could have been REALLY bad. The sorts where if I'd reacted just slightly later, well... yeah, I'd rather not think about what might have happened. But the key point is that I did react fast enough, and it didnt happen. And that coordination can help keep you on the road, even in horrible conditions, so you dont have to deal with the hilarious fun of having your car towed/pulled out of a snowbank in a ditch in the middle of some forest in who knows where.

Secondly, it also gave me my interest in computers. I wanted to know how these games were made, and how I could maybe design some that were like the ones I played. I started learning Basic programming at a very young age, probably around 7 I think, and it wasnt all that long before I could make my own (very crude) games out of it. Of course, these were simple things... this was back in the DOS era, and I was just a kid that was learning this stuff on my own... but still, I was able to do it. I kept this up, and my interest in computers never died, even if I do hate the blasted things some days.

While I dont work anymore due to disability (from the autism), I do still have an associates degree in computer science, which is part of where that road led me down. I dont think I would have ever gotten that without this hobby.

In addition to that, I've met people through this. Friends that became close friends, that I've known for a very long time and remain close to. People I'd never have met if it wasnt for this. And I mean *real* friends. The sort that actually accept me entirely; they dont get bothered by the fact that I can be very randomly antisocial, or that my warped "schedule" may change abruptly at any given moment, or all of the other things that autism causes for me. So I'm very glad that it led me to them. Very very glad.

Past that, new hobbies were also born. I'm not going to go into the nonsensical chain of events that led to it, but the gaming hobby led directly into a love of anime conventions and cosplay. This hobby involves alot of travelling; because of this, I've gotten used to driving long distances. And because gaming had taught me the value of exploration (seriously, that's something it teaches well) I've always been very comfortable in exploring new places I"ve never been to (so long as they arent in a major city or other hyper-crowded place). Put those two together, and I can travel very easily on my own; something that even many NTs just cannot do. Hell, I'll even go get in the car, if I'm bored enough in the middle of the night, and just go randomly drive down roads I"ve never been down just to see where the heck they go. Me living in the absolute middle of nowhere, these roads are usually a confusing, tangled, broken down mess that just lead to more such roads, also in the middle of nowhere, which I will also then turn down, because hey, interesting road there, I wonder where THAT goes? And so on. The same methods of thinking that I apply in games when exploring works IRL. Mostly, obviously some things are sure different, but the basic concepts all apply.

Something else though that they gave me was a love of logic puzzles. It's not just something like Chess that can teach these. I have SO many games, so very many, that work by using alot of pure logic. People always have this obnoxious idea that gaming is all about BOOM HEADSHOT!!!111 and other damn silly things, and while those things can be fun, they're not all there is to it. I'm very used to solving all sorts of puzzles, and I also play alot of strategy games, and even simulation games. I grew up with games like Simcity, Sim Earth, both of which are complicated (and really, really good) simulators, or games like Lode Runner even, which is both something like a platformer, but also an often very difficult puzzle game; you have to solve these difficult puzzles while at the same time constantly running from extremely persistent foes, and in that game, you can lose not just to them, but because of making even ONE slight mistake. Games like those can teach logic and things of that nature just like the sorts you're thinking of. And of course, that's just those examples, and those are some of the simpler ones; they're from the old days, really. There are games that are much deeper now, much harder, much more complicated. Granted, they still often have a hard time matching the sheer fun and goodness of those classics, but still.... there's ALOT to them. These things all tend to be on PC though; I find that the consoles by themselves tend to give off that impression of gaming being mindless as games like that simply dont sell on there. Well... not these days anyway. But that's another story.


And finally, nowadays, well, I should just say, very recently, two things have happened. I got into another hobby recently, known as "cubing", which comes off of my love of solving all those puzzles in games and stuff when they have to do with logic. Cubing involves things like, well, the basic Rubik's cube, which is the absolute base of the hobby. I learned to solve that (and I dont mean with memorized "speed" methods) in about 2 days. I have now gotten off to a good start in collecting all sorts of cubes (or sometimes "cubes" with sarcastic quotes, as they're not always cube shaped). This, for example, is an X-Cube: http://imgur.com/a/E8aR8 shown both in it's solved state, and it's scrambled state. As you can see, it changes shape. Definitely a ton harder than the normal cube everyone's seen... and that's just the start. That one's pretty easy for me now (and alot of fun). Currently, I'm learning about this thing: http://i.imgur.com/djoIdxt.png Those are "Geared Mixup Cubes". Those exploded disasters of confusion and absurdity make the X-cube look downright braindead easy by comparison. On a normal cube, you turn one face at a time. But you cant do that on these; on any gear puzzle, when you turn one part, a variety of other parts start to do strange things, as the entire thing is literally all gears. As you can see, this particular puzzle becomes a hideous ball of nonsense really fast. But my skill level and understanding have come far enough, in under 6 weeks, that I should have the little nightmare solved for the first time within the next couple of days. And of course, this all ties back to the gaming; I can do this because I've gotten used to learning *very* complicated things in short amounts of time, and of course video games often than add a pile of pressure of some sort on top of all the logic stuff you already have to do. Games have also shown me that even things that appear to have a difficulty that's downright absurd can be learned and understood.

And lastly, I'm also now contracted to an indie developer right now, working with them on a game they are making (due out at the end of January). This happened ENTIRELY because of, well, all of the gaming stuff. I didnt go searching for this bit of work; they came to me, I was just someone on their forums that did alot of free testing of their games (and bug reporting, whee...) and I'd gotten to know them fairly well, and they realized that the stuff I knew how to make (and the skillset I have, in terms of design, is very rare, since it involves a niche genre, but I know *alot* about it) was relevant to what they were designing, and I'd also been able to demonstrate that knowledge. So, I was approached with a contract offer, and am now working on it with them. It's actually my SECOND contract with them; the first one went so well (about a year ago) that it was pretty much guaranteed that there would be a second one later on. Now I'm doing that, and my role in the project has turned out to be pretty big; big enough that, if I screw it up, the whole project will go down (no pressure at all! ugh). But I know what I'm doing, and it goes wonderfully so far. Everyone's very pleased with it and everything is coming together nicely. It's looking very promising.

And that opportunity to finally MAKE something game to me JUST because of my knowledge of bullet-hell shmups (look up the genre if you dont know what it is). That's literally the entire reason that this came about.

Which just goes to show... you never know what might happen, and you never know just what might turn out to be very useful in the future. Which, I suppose, is the OTHER thing that this all has taught me.

So yeah, that's just some of my own experiences with this.... sorry for such a long post, but it's a topic I find very interesting (it's often brought up) and since it's my special interest, it's very easy for me to say alot about it. Kudos to you if you actually bothered to read the whole thing.

Fallout 3 taught me a great deal about morality. Part of the reason I hate Fallout 4, they scrapped the Karma system and now everything's just "gray", which in my opinion is just lazy.

Misery that was tldr

I think I actually learned basic social skills in RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate. The conversations in those games were interesting.

Ive learned a large portion of social interaction from Final Fantasy XI when I played thar for the majority of my childhood and adolescence. The fascinating thing about that though is it didn't carry from the game to other people online, it allowed me to bypass the social awkwardness of real encounters with real people. It's like I skipped a phase that many others go through thanks to a game I hold very dear.

Though XI at the time was more than game. It was nearly a lifestyle.

I'm very charismatic. Thank you, Tanaka.

Certain video games have honestly taught me important life lessons [Final Fantasy VII, VI, IX, and X; Radiant Historia, Pokemon Explorers of Sky, and so forth] and have inspired me with writing my books [there's a reason why there's so many crystals in my books...]

That's one reason I like the brain age series of games for Nintendo DS and similar games, I get smarter as I play.

M̶a̶s̶s̶ ̶E̶f̶f̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶2̶ ̶t̶a̶u̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶p̶o̶o̶r̶ ̶d̶e̶c̶i̶s̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶u̶l̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶e̶v̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶e̶q̶u̶e̶n̶c̶e̶s̶ ̶(̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶t̶h̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶r̶i̶e̶n̶d̶)̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶e̶a̶s̶i̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶t̶i̶f̶i̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶l̶o̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶a̶v̶e̶.̶

I just play games for fun, not for life lessons. And I resent the perception that it's just a a way of killing time. Watching Michael Bay movies is a form of mindless entertainment, but for most video games, or the good ones at least, they require active participation. You've got to be coordinated, or use your brain to solve a puzzle, or be coordinated while using your brain to solve a puzzle. Take a game like Diablo, where you need to process large amounts of stats and compare them effectively to create a solid character. RTS games obviously require brain power, which is probably why I'm not very good at them.

MOBA games improve critical thinkings and FPSes are told to improve environmental awareness. Turns out it doesn't work for me.