Erik Yan
Dr. Carrie Hall
Final Draft
2-5-19
Video Games Taught Me More Than School Ever Did
Life is a whole learning lesson. The way we learn is completely up to us. I think the best way of learning is to make the process fun and relatable. Something that made learning fun for me was video games. Video games does not look like it would teach you anything that is taught at school but it instead teaches you social skills that school just doesn’t seem to teach.
Playing video games has taught me a handful of things. I think a game that taught me a lot is Rainbow Six Siege. My friends and I would play this every day. There are times where not all my friends can get on to play for whatever reason, which forces me to play alone. Playing Siege alone was difficult due to Siege being a team oriented game where having intel and communicating it to the rest of the team is key to winning. Since I was just playing with random people when my friends weren’t on, I didn’t really talk to any of the people on my team. I kept seeing my teammates getting killed but I was busy dealing with my own enemy, but once I’m done with my opponent, my teammate’s enemy stopped fighting with them and decide to go finish me off. With the lack of communication, I didn’t really know and I get killed. It went on like this for the whole game and in the end, we lost the game. The next game, I tried giving callout to my teammates and we actually won the game without the other team even getting a chance to win a round. The fact that we are all strangers and were able to come together to win forced random people and I to have to talk and interact with each other. As strange as that may be, this can be carried over into the real world.
Since playing video games have gotten more complex than in the past, majority of games filled with so many things to do. This also helps improve multitasking skills. In Siege you have to worry about all kinds of things, such as the enemy team, traps, and if the gamemode is hostage then also that. You also have to worry about the time and your teammates. I say teammates because in this game your team can technically kills you, it is strongly recommended not to by the game but, that doesn’t really stop people from doing it, so it is good to watch out. All these facts forces you to have to multitask. This has kind of improved my multitasking skills because it forces me to finish a certain task within a given amount of time. The timer in the game is probably the thing that helped me the most in multitasking because you only get three minutes a round. Sometimes you lose track of time when you are worrying about your own life in the game. The traps in the game can take down a significant amount of health away from you and can give away where you are to the enemy team who can just come out of nowhere and kill you.
Decision making isn’t really taught in school from my experience, I think I’ve felt more of a decision making in video games than in school. As I have said before about how you have to multitask, you also have to decide how you want to approach things and how you want to do it. There have been moments where I had to decide whether I had to get into the objective or kill the last guy on the other team because time was ticking. This taught me about making the important decision and how it will impact the final moments of the round. In school, I’d get choices but I felt like it didn’t really matter which one I chose, the results would generally be the same. While on Siege, If I did not go into the objective while the time almost hit zero, I would have lost the round and our team would’ve been put at a disadvantage.
The most important things I think I’ve learned is probably patience. There are times in Siege where you have to wait for the other team to come at you so that all you need to do is kill them. If you go rushing in, the other team will be ready for you and catch you off guard. School never really taught me patience because I’d get homework or other assignments due the next day so I never really put much time into the work. It wasn’t straight trash but if I had more time, I’m sure it would’ve been better.
Having an objective to accomplish in a video game brings together everyone that is playing. You won’t really find the kind of teamwork in videos in like school or somewhere else with people that do not know each other. It also taught me how to multitask better which school kind of helped but it didn’t really feel as impactful as learning it from playing games. Decision making and patience were things I felt like were something I’m glad I learned because there are a lot of decisions to make in life and some things in life can’t really be rushed so having patience helps. I find that learning these values from something other than school is more interesting to me because it appeals to me a lot more.
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