Why do you play games? It is a question gamers have heard thousands of times along with its negative comments and responses. As people around you might think playing games is a task to pass time and with less productivity. They see games with mixed reviews on how they might impact us in life and our connection between the virtual and real world.
It might be hard for non-gamers to understand from an out-of-the-box perspective the benefits of gaming. Through time gaming has adapted, from devices such as Gameboy to mobile phone games or consoles to high-end computer games. It even has changed its interactivity with the player. Gaming is a form of entertainment that might have the stereotyped as childlike or immature, but it has positive outcomes if you look closer at what gaming is about.
Reasons Gaming Is a Good Hobby:
1. Focus
Playing a game requires you to focus and be consistently looking out for details. It’s a good way of training you to focus while simultaneously adjusting or reacting to situations. While in the game, you are typically set in some form of timer or challenge to complete the mission that requires your 100% attention. Games will have you look out at your surroundings or the environment around your characters so you can interact and respond fast. These situations can require you to respond fast or even test your overall level of focus to detail about the game.
2. Problem-Solving Skills
Gaming also allows you to see problems from all perspectives and help improve your critical thinking. When you play games your brain begins to solve multiple problems and processes that help you complete the game itself or how to improve. What is also great is there are unlimited amounts of times you can try a game which helps establish faster critical thinking. You get to train for patience, problem-solving, and sometimes ways to calm frustrations. These fun activities can actually be quite useful in everyday life on your own decision-making and processes.
Critical thinking and problem-solving skills are essential in everyday life and in the growth of a career. By practicing and learning from mistakes, you learn to see things in different ways, by understanding and applying your new skills allows for quick thinking and possibly smarter outcomes.
3. Multi-Tasking
One of the biggest challenges and valuable skills is multi-tasking, especially coordination. When it comes to hand-eye coordination as well as reaction time gaming can certainly be a great way to train your body. An individual needs to look at the character and surroundings to know what is going on. More importantly, the reaction to certain situations helps improve communications as well as the ability to multi-task in certain scenarios. Gamers have noticed some improvement in the ability to multi-task and react to ongoing movements around them.
4. Communication
For anyone that is not comfortable with public speaking in a social setting, gaming is a fantastic way for them to connect with people and make new friends. As you are behind the screen, on the computer playing your favorite game that you enjoy, it helps to ease your worry a bit to speak as compared to in person. It is a great way to create a connection through a passion or a common interest. You have the option to do text, voice, or video group gaming, whichever the players feel comfortable with for communication. By sharing the same interests in games, you instantly have a topic to talk about and can ask for recommendations or advice, it allows you to break the ice to talk to someone. It is also great to understand that communication ranges between people so finding those to that you feel comfortable talking is the most important step first.
5. Time Management
Gaming is a time-consuming task, and great time management helps to take time off and have a good balance. You can learn to prioritize your schedule by getting the important tasks done and out of the way, so you have valuable game time with no disruptions. You learn to practice and see what time works best for you when you overplay and need adjustment to your daily life schedule. Also within the game, there are sometimes trials or tests that are timed so you better learn to manage certain tasks or understand your capacity.
6. Creativity
A unique gaming trait that some don’t realize is creativity. Creativity is honestly one of the most important skills for anyone to learn. There are lots of jobs out there that are looking for creative people for new ideas, content, and improvement. Gaming is an experience that is full of various creative ideas that require you to think out of the box. There are mini-games where you need to look for clues to solve puzzle problems or stories that help shape your thought processes. The way gaming engages our artistic side of the mind and critical thinking allows us to be more creative in problem-solving. The more creative we are as people, sometimes solutions to things that have been done in a routine way can be improved upon.
Gaming is a Modern Tool for Improvement
Gaming is an underestimated hobby that is liked by lots of gamers. The support that gaming has been receiving with the expansion of the variety of topics and genres in the industry is overwhelming. Gaming is a rising trend and as much as we enjoy the freedom of the game, we should also value the difference. We need to play games in a welcoming, respectful, supportive, caring, and understanding manner that creates and maintains harmony in the virtual and real world. This means we need to help be inclusive to all those who join this gaming world. The more we include and the more we help improve gaming it could very well help change our world for the better.
