In general, some people seem to agree that video games are really bad for you. I mean, us, gamers don’t think that way, but ‘normal’ people do. They think that video games don’t teach anything, that they will be bad for you as soon as you start to play a video game for two hours a day.
You see, I strongly disagree with that, so in this post, I am going to talk about five things that video games actually taught me (more specifically about StarCraft).
StarCraft is one of these games that are hard to master (if not impossible to master). I know I’ve played this game for I don’t even know how many hours anymore, but I’m sure I’ve played it an absolute ton!
Anyway, there’s a whole lot of things you can learn from games, but these are the five I have selected to share.
1. Hard work gets rewarded
In real life it’s quite hard to actually track progress because when you go to school, work etc., the time just goes by, weeks go by and you don’t really realize whether or not you’ve made progress.
However, in StarCraft it’s very easy to figure out how well you’ve been doing and how well you’ve been playing. In general, it is very obvious that the more time you invest in a certain task the better you will become at that one specific task. In StarCraft you can go up in ranks and actually see how well you are competing versus your opponents.
In real life, it’s exactly the same. If you spend a lot of time on something, it will obviously get better, it will improve. This is one of the main things I’ve definitely learned from playing years and years of video games.
2. People never blame themselves
It’s actually a little bit of a people skill, but in general, people are kind of mean! Especially in video games, you will notice very quickly that people will never ever blame themselves,! Even though it’s obvious that they were at the mistake.
For example, in StarCraft people actually, rage because they are losing and they will blame everything but themselves. Often times people will search for a reason, while they are actually at the mistake. So, that actually means they will either blame something like balance, which is very obvious in StarCraft.
They will blame time or other people. Basically, they will blame everything but themselves. StarCraft has taught me that quite often you are actually the problem, not something else. You are the one that needs to improve.
3. Focus
I think this is one the most important things. Often what happens is that you spend a lot of time on things that are really not that important.
For example, I realized that I spent 80% of my time doing things that are not important and 20% doing things that are actually valuable in the near future. The same goes in real life. If you manage to focus on only the task that you either aim to do or a task you are actually awarded for, you will obviously make a ton of progress if you spend your time efficiently.
4. Finish what you started
This is very obvious in StarCraft because you can’t just launch a game and then just walk away in the middle of it. That’s just not going to happen. You need to sit down and actually focus for the entire duration of the game!
It’s similar in real life. What I used to do was just sit down, do 10 minutes of work, then do something else for another 10 minutes and eventually get back to work. Nowadays I actually can get a ton of stuff done a lot easier thanks to StarCraft! I just sit down, focus on one task and do it until it’s done for hours to an end. That is something I could definitely not do before playing StarCraft.
5. Rage
This is arguably the most important one - I pretty much lack the ability to rage nowadays! Before I started to play StarCraft I used to get mad quite often about little things, but nowadays I have realized in the crud scheme of things it’s really no big deal. If you actually can control the rage you get in StarCraft, for example, when you lose and start blaming others, and if you manage to start controlling that, it will actually help in every single aspect of your life. However, if you don’t rage at all and manage to stay calm in most situations, it will definitely help you out and make you a much happier person!
So, who’s to tell that there’s nothing to learn from video games? That’s right, there are countless things to learn from video games that can help in any aspect of our lives. Personally, these are the things StarCraft has taught me and in case I have missed any important ones, let me know in the comment section right below.
