this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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I strongly believe that video games are underappreciated in just how much they help us develop certain skills.
I'm talking long-term planning, resource distribution, tactics, hand-eye coordination, teamwork, skillset comprehension and task allocation based on it, language skills, interpersonal skills (ironically), and can even serve as a font of self-knowledge if one dives deep enough!
Yea, no. It surely has some positive, just like pretty much anything. But if you look at it as something you do instead of something else, you start accumulating a lot of negatives.
There's no way any fine motor skill is somehow more developed than, say, playing almost any sport, that involves more than just two hands, and a similar thing can be said as far as teamwork and resilence goes.
On the fantasy side you have to compete with reading or, more broadly, studying.
It probably wins against binge watching b-rated tv series or idlessly watching TV, but if you get the wrong tytle you won't bring home that much value. (Say you are stuck playing COD on a loop).
I think an healthy varied diet of activities and stimuli is still the way for getting the best out of life.
A study once showed that pro gamers did actually have better reaction times than professional athletes of other types.
As far as the other stuff in their list, though, games are too shallow to have any weight towards experiencing the real life equivalent of their themes.
I respect your opinion, and the fact that it differs from mine:))
I think it very much depends on the game. Some reflex-based games most certainly compete, same with a lot of team-based games and story-focused ones. Some even excel at this, it all depends on the intention behind them. I can personally say that having played a lot of strategy and management games has helped me to develop palpable planning and management skills, of which I've made ample use while I held a Project Manager position, as an example.
My teenage years were spent in Warcraft III. I sucked at it, I'm terrible at multitasking.
It could very well be that you were already good at that and that translated both into enjoying strategy game and succeeding as a Project Manager.
Well, there ya' go! I still suck at Warcraft III, and not for a lack of trying!:))
Maybe you do have a point about having predilections for certain skillsets, but I can say with certainty that I've never aced a game the first (dozens of) time I picked it up. But they helped me narrow down my thinking in terms of priorities, they helped me develop a "nose" for strengths and shortcomings in someone's skillset, they basically taught me what the practical side of management entails.
Same with long-form sim games, those taught me how to plan for the long-term, how to form contingencies, how to deal with the unforeseen, etc.
In an actual human being? What kind of game are you thinking about here?
Well, pretty much any RPG - used to play a lot of Neverwinter Nights, developed an addiction to TES and Fallout 3/NV just like everyone else, dipped my toes in the classic Fallouts in high-school, and it just kept growing from there.
In addition, a lot of well-made RTS/management/sim games [Warlords Battlecry III, Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader, 40k: Dawn of War (the first and second batches, I devoured them as they came out, but III is... no), the C&Cs, several Total War titles, StarCraft, the SpellForce series, Age of Empires, the classics, pretty much], also taught me the importance of unit/team composition, which, to me, is an abstractised and simplified way of keeping track of such aspects. They don't teach everything which one should keep in mind, but they sure taught me to keep an eye on skills in general.