Get Schooled: 10 Life Lessons Learned from Gaming

Posted 11/30/2011 at 11:17am | by Dan Scharff

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Everything we need to know, we learned from video games

When we were kids, all we heard was how worthless video games were. "Those dopey things will rot your brain," was a favorite of my grandmother's, and even watching television was considered far more educational and intellectual than the mind-melting morass that was video games. Just how much I learned from reruns of Three's Company, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Magnum P.I. is debatable, but I can tell you, there are plenty of valuable life lessons I learned from video games.

Think Outside the Box

So, you're stuck in a room and all you have at your disposal is a rubber chicken (with a pulley in the middle, of course), a bit of string, and a broken pencil. How do you escape? While we may not face such byzantine and bizarre conundrums in real life (although getting out of the MaxPC lab using just a motherboard and a SATA cable can be tricky), when we do have to come up with creative solutions to puzzles, we can thank video games for expanding our problem-solving horizons.

MacGuyver's got nothin' on us. We just saved the world with an assortment of trash, novelty toys, and a pair of chopsticks.

From the somewhat arcane item-based adventure games of yesteryear, to the more organic, environmental puzzles in games like Portal, games have taught us to carefully study our environment one pixel, er, inch at a time to better understand our surroundings.

Practice Makes Perfect

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posited that the key to true success in any given field is the 10,000 hour rule. Basically, in order to master something, you'll need to practice—a lot.  There's only so far that natural talent and quick reflexes will get you, and while this may seem like common sense, this fact is hammered home repeatedly any time you play games competitively.

Clearly this man is perfect.

Ever taken a peek at your Steam friends list and noticed that one buddy of yours who's played three thousand hours of Team Fortress 2? He's a tad shy of Gladwell's 10k, but he's probably still pretty damn good. Every time you're being headshot by a Prestige with a 30-frag kill streak, or watching with awe as professional StarCraft 2 players effortlessly glide around at over 300 actions per minute, just remember, this didn't happen overnight, they practiced like mad to get so good. So, just apply that 10,000 hour rule outside of gaming and you're golden—though you'll probably still get owned in multiplayer.

Gravity Hurts

Another rule from the annals of common sense, and one that in theory is hardcoded into our genetics, is that gravity always wins. However, there are still people who don't treat gravity with quite the, well, gravity that it deserves. Gaming has long taught us, however, that gravity is not something to be taken lightly.

Whether it's Donkey Kong giving a hands-on (and heads-on) lesson in the power of falling barrels, or our own player avatars screaming in horror as they plunge into a ragdolly pile of gibs and twisted limbs, we've learned to take fall hazards seriously. So yes mom, I'm sorry I hung from the guard rail at Niagara Falls when I was 6, but thanks to games (and thankfully not to real life experience) I've learned my lesson.

Respect Water

For years people have complained that water death is one of the most unrealistic aspects of gaming. Gaming heroes are shot, stabbed, beaten, mauled by animals, and otherwise abused in ways that would be fatal to anyone shy of Superman, and yet one quick dip into the drink and it's lights out. Well this bit of wicked witch-esque hydrophobia may be a bit off-putting given the superhuman context of games, but gaming isn't all wet here—water kills.

Drowning, sharks, man-eating tigers, there's plenty of reasons to stay out of water.

While our Google fact-finding mission yielded massive fluctuations regarding drowning mortality statistics (between 140,000 and 1.2 million per year, globally), drowning is still the second highest cause of accidental death in children. Plus, while man may be the unquestioned master of land, all our fancy tools and gadgets quickly fall apart in the water. Just about every aquatic creature could kick our ass in its native environment—put spikes on a starfish and we're toast. Clearly, the only reason we survived childhood was a healthy fear of water cultivated by games.