Mom, I Will Not Stop Playing Online Games!

If you're going to play, you need to learn to play well. Or, put another way: how video games can improve your real-world skills. There are countless passionate gamers, but a lot of people still think playing is a bad habit or a waste of time. However, my experience as a gamer shows that valuable lessons can be drawn from many games.

Although it may seem obvious, it's worth remembering that what defines online games is the ability to play with real people. That helps you learn to communicate with them, manage them, understand their behavior, habits and problems, and anticipate their moves.

Communication

Talk more with the people you play with. It's a great way to improve your communication skills, get better results in the game, and practice typing. In online games, you should never play alone if you can avoid it: look for friends, take part in events, use voice chat. Even if you're young, don't hold back from talking with adult players. That said, be smart: if you want others to listen to you, your behavior has to be adult too. In games like Lineage 2, large clans usually have someone in charge of getting to know people who want to join, and it's not unusual for that role to be filled by a teenager whose opinion is respected by players 10 or 20 years older.

Real-world skills: that experience teaches you to communicate effectively with other people, which is very useful, for example, when interviewing candidates for a job: it helps you understand them better and more accurately identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Entrepreneurial spirit

In MMORPGs like Lineage 2, Aion or World of Warcraft, you quickly learn what it means to be a businessperson, especially how to earn and manage money. In an online world everyone is thinking about how to get rich, and you have to come up with a few smart strategies to make it happen for you too:

• buy low and sell higher.
• specialize in something unique and sell that service. For example, you can fill a specialized role in a group to help others fight monsters.
• find people who will back you up.

Real-world skills: if you learn and practice these ways of making money online, you'll be able to apply them well in the real world.

Management and leadership

Be active in games and don't be afraid to take on responsibility for others. When you're in a dungeon with 6 strangers, someone has to coordinate them; otherwise, the odds of success drop sharply. That someone can be you. Of course, it comes with a certain amount of responsibility, but in an online game you can fail a dungeon run many times and use that experience to think about your mistakes. Over time you improve and end up leading your group to success. It's an experience of incalculable value. In games like Aion, the leaders of a large legion organize raids and castle sieges where they coordinate hundreds of players in real time, deciding what each subgroup does and where it goes — and the success or failure of the mission depends on those decisions.

Real-world skills: this experience teaches you the principles of people management better than any boring book. It's also an ideal way to practice and keep those skills sharp. If you're able to successfully lead 300 people, you'll be able to handle managing any small department, project or business.

A company's growing pains

When you play online you run into a lot of the same growing pains that real companies have. MMORPG clans always start with a handful of people. They might be good in combat, smart and work well together, but to go further you need more people. Once you reach 30–50 members, you realize it's time to give the clan a proper structure, delegate responsibilities, set up reward systems, show a path for progression, and so on. If you get it right, your clan can grow to around 200 members. At that point you'll be able to achieve a lot of things that are normally out of reach, like taking down raid bosses, ruling your own castles and earning huge amounts of virtual money.

Real-world skills: simply knowing about that problem gives you the chance to avoid it.

Staying alert

When you're young, it's normal to be naive. Online games strip that away fast, because wherever there are complex social groups, there's fraud. Lineage 2 offered plenty of ways to make money through scams. Imagine your character crosses the town and you see someone selling, at a ridiculously low price, that amazing moonstone you'd been looking for. You buy it, thrilled with your find, but a few minutes later you realize you've been handed a fake: something that looks like a moonstone but is actually some other material that's useless.

Real-world skills: even today I have friends who've spent 30 years making the same mistakes and losing real money simply from not paying enough attention and falling for scams.

Fast decision-making

Needless to say, there's no script when you're fighting a real person in an online game. To compete, you have to train your decision-making ability and your mental agility. Imagine you have about 20–25 skills for a fight and your opponent has another 20–25 different ones. While fighting, you have to keep in mind factors like the cooldown times of their abilities and yours, which skills your opponent has and how they affect you, and the terrain around you. All of that can make the difference between victory and defeat. And to pile on even more pressure, if you want any chance of winning, you have to do all that analysis in real time.

Real-world skills: whether you're learning to drive or in an important negotiation, thinking fast and accurately is the key to success. It's an excellent general skill worth mastering.

Strategy

To succeed in a game you have to plan. Time is limited, so you have to set short- and long-term goals to get the most out of the game and make good use of your time. If you're able to plan your way through complex in-game challenges, you develop a related set of skills that help you design effective strategies.

Real-world skills: business, projects and many other areas of life need an effective strategy. Without thinking about strategy or having the skills to execute it, you'll be relying only on luck and chance, and that won't get you very far.

Persistence

Persistence is a defining trait of any veteran MMORPG player and, probably, the area where they help you improve the most. In Lineage 2 you have to kill thousands upon thousands of nearly identical monsters in the same spot, spending 3–4 hours to earn just 3–4% of the experience needed to level up. Only by doing the same thing every day for a long time do you reach a high level.

Real-world skills: even something as simple as writing a short article like this one requires a certain amount of persistence to do well. Persistence also helps you stay true to your goals and achieve what you want in life, especially in your career and personal projects.

Stress management

When you play in a team with people you don't know well, every now and then someone will try to ruin the match on purpose: picking the wrong characters, helping the opposing team, or in a thousand other ways. It's fairly common in online games. Some people get angry and burn a lot of energy trying to explain to those people that they're wrong. But the reality is that this only ends up hurting themselves and, possibly, other team members. Another example: the rival team will provoke you on purpose to get under your skin and make you slip up. To succeed, you have to learn to manage it, rise above it, and keep anger from taking over.

Real-world skills: you can't expect to always work with or talk to nice people, friendly customers or reasonable bosses. Sometimes, for example, you'll see negative comments on your articles that will seem completely unfair. The experience of handling that pressure from games helps you react to these situations in the healthiest, most constructive way.

Conclusion

Like most people, over the years I have less time to play than before, but it's still a good way to unwind after a hard day's work. Online worlds can't replace the real one, so even though games can help you improve certain skills, you need to apply them sensibly to get the most out of them. And finally, when you play, try to get something real out of it. Analyze what you do and improve where you can. I don't regret the time I spent playing as a kid, because it was fun, memorable and helped me in a real and tangible way.