Your Parents Were Wrong About Video Games
There’s a high likelihood that someone in your life, at some point, has told you that video games are a waste of time. Maybe they even made fun of you for playing them (even though they themselves spend far too much time on their appearance and are part of a gang that sings musicals). You might even have believed them and started to feel like you should probably stop playing games at some point because you’re wasting your life. But what if I told you that they were wrong? What if I told you that video games will save you, and that, in fact, they’re the very reason you’re still here today, thriving?
Most people who have never touched a game in their lives think that video games are simply for fun, and that’s why we have them as a hobby. Some people even still think games are for kids, like my dentist whose only reference for gaming is Fortnite and teenagers whenever we talk about gaming during my check ups. What they don’t understand is that that quaint little hobby they think is all about hedonistic self indulgence has played a significant role in shaping almost every gamer’s lives. It’s not just about fun; heck, that’s not even the main reason we play games. Like a tree, the tendrils reach far deeper than what your grandma thinks.
Most of us started playing games in our childhoods and early teens, and that’s really where this story starts. See, that period in your life can be a lonely experience, even if you do have a lot of friends on the face of it. Maybe you’ve got stuff going on at home that makes you anxious, depressed, or just plain old down in the dumps. I know I did, and that’s where my gaming journey began. I would spend hours in front of a massive CRT TV – some would say too close and maybe that’s how I got these glasses – playing PlayStation 1 and 2, or the original Xbox and Xbox 360. In fact, I played pretty much anything I could get my hands on. Because as gaming was starting to become more mainstream, games had started to develop into experiences that would rival other media, like movies and books.
What I didn’t realize then that I know now is that games were giving me the community that I didn’t know I longed for. Playing something like Silent Hill 2 or Snake Eater, whose narratives had strong themes that were meant to make us think, helped give me a sense of emotional connection to others. This was both through the game’s stories themselves but also through the real-life connections we made through sharing these experiences. I’ll never forget the release of Metal Gear Solid 2, when me and a friend stayed up all day and night to beat the game. Or there were the times we all huddled around in a group at school, discussing the latest game drop or plot twist. And I’m sure you have similar stories that cause you to think back with a nostalgic smile on your face.
We’ve all had dark periods in our lives, and being able to get some escapism from whatever is on our minds is one of the most important factors of playing games, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. Sometimes you need a cathartic release, and getting immersed in a good story that you can relate to is what you need: think The Last of Us or God of War. Sometimes you need something uplifting, and that’s where cozy games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley come in, because after all, wouldn’t it just be nice to leave the world behind and move into an old farm in the middle of nowhere? In a recent investigation into how Animal Crossing New Horizons affected people, I found out that many players state that Tom Nook and company literally saved their lives in March of 2020, as the world went into a depressing lockdown.
Sometimes, community is what you’re lacking. Perhaps you live in a rural area with not a lot to do, or maybe you just don’t feel like you fit in with the world around you. Either way, games are a great way to forge a sense of community in your life. I’m not talking about just having conversations with people you bump into in real life, either. I’m talking about the very real bonds formed online through shared experiences. Imagine this, it’s 2 am and around you everyone is sleeping, but you’re playing an MMO like World of Warcraft. The world is bustling, and in those dark hours, you get a sense that there are millions of others out there just like you. You jump into a dungeon solo, and your tank is a funny guy who likes to talk a lot. He brings you out of your shell, so you add him to play some more. Before you know it, you’re voice chatting in Discord, and you’ve made a friend on the other side of the world.
You might not be an MMO player, but it’s more than likely you know exactly what I’m talking about. We all have that one online friend whose friendship bonds were forged in some kind of insanity that can only take place in a game played online; in the space between real life and imagination. One of my favourite examples of this is the group of 8 players I teamed up with in the first days of the DayZ mod release. We started as a duo and picked up strangers in random encounters across the game’s world. We spent 12 hours working our way across the map, only to be attacked by zombies, never to see each other in-game again because it spawns you in random locations. We did, however, add each other on Steam, where we all remain friends to this day. From different locations in the world, this is the power of community that video games can impart. These relationships are also far deeper people realise. There’s always that one person who considers your online friends just some people you play a game with, but let’s face it, we all know it has far more depth than that. Because often, despite not being physically there, those friends will support you more than those you know in real life.
This is where we should also talk about forum communities, like Reddit, which foster a wider sense of community and belonging. I’ll use the Life Is Strange subreddit as an example here. The series has been going for over 10 years at this point, but the impact that the games have had on people, especially the original game, has lived on in a vibrant Reddit community. You know that something in your life is having a real effect on you when you’re at work or school and you find yourself drifting off, thinking about and analysing different aspects of it and what questions you should ask the community or look up to find out more about, say, the lore of the game’s world. We do it with books, tv shows, and movies that captivate us, so why would it be any different for games?
Setting the community aspects aside for a moment, there are so many hidden benefits to playing games that people just don’t think about. Let’s take the Assassin’s Creed series for example. Despite what you think of Ubisoft and how the series has turned out over the years, the amount of information you can learn from those games can rival a history or geography class. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey you can explore the golden age of 5th century classical Greece. In Valhalla, you can explore Viking England, seeing how these warriors shaped the post-Roman landscape. In Assassin’s Creed 3, you get to experience the American Revolution in real time. And the operative word here is “Experience.” Yes, there are other ways of learning this information: books, school, documentaries. But there’s no other way you can EXPERIENCE the very real lived situations of people in the past as if you were really there. Where else can you be part of a viking invasion or the battle of bunker hill? And that’s not to mention the database entries that you can read up on for extra context. Assassin’s Creed Origins even had a discovery mode whose sole focus was learning about real-life ancient Egypt.
Of course, this isn’t solely related to the Assassin’s Creed series. Simply play through a Yakuza game and you’ll start to realize that you’re starting to pick up Japanese language after a store clerk screams at Ishiramisen at you for the 500th time. Or maybe you’ll find yourself in conversation with your parents, telling them advice on what crops and flowers to plant at what time of year because you’ve been playing Stardew Valley too much. I mean, how do you explain that you know the full start up sequence for an Airbus A380 plane or Mercedes Actros truck? It’s likely you’ve encountered this situation before, where your in-depth explanation leaves someone looking at you like you’re Giorgio A. Tsoukalos and you’ve just said “aliens” on a history channel. But you know what? You’re better off for it. Next time grandma wants to plant strawberries on Christmas day, let her. What did she ever do for you anyway? Tootsie Rolls aren’t real candy anyw—
The benefits of gaming aren’t, however, just resigned to pure academic or intellectual learning. It’s your emotional and personal growth that will arguably benefit most from playing games as a hobby. Well, lifestyle. Let’s face it, once you’re in there’s no getting out. Let’s use The Last of Us Part 2 as an example here. There is simply no other media that can force you to take control of an antagonist to see their point of view. In the case of The Last of Us, it’s when we start playing as Abby and hunting down Ellie and company. In our heart of hearts, we don’t want to be doing that. We love Joel and Ellie and the gang of interesting characters in their lives – but playing as Abby, especially during the flashbacks, allows us to see what she went through and why she ended up seeing the events of the game a different way. The moral of the story being that everybody is going through things in their lives, and the way one individual perceives something is totally different from another. Can we truly say either of them is wrong with morally grey areas like this?
In a similar respect, Games can also be like time capsules that provide a snapshot of a certain time and place that we can never physically go back to. A game like Shenmue, for example, exemplifies this perfectly. Anyone who has tried the Dreamcast’s life simulator knows that it captures daily life in 1990s Japan to such a realistic degree that it will have you nostalgic for somewhere you’ve never been. A time, in Shenmue’s case, when wearing brown leather jackets and drainpipe jeans was all the rage. But the nostalgia doesn’t stop there. We can also link games to what was going on in our own lives. At the start of this video I told you a personal anecdote about Metal Gear Solid 2, and it’s a memory that will forever be significant to me. I will always remember that time spent with my best friend being related to the great time we had playing the game together.
It’s clear from these examples that video games are more than a hobby for a lot of us. They’re more of a lifestyle, because unless you’re the sort of person who only plays COD, FIFA, or MADDEN every year, then the chances are you will think about games more like a form of art. You’ll count the days and months in the year based on what game releases are pencilled into the calendar, and you’ll know birthdays are coming because people will say things like “just give him money” so they don’t have to wander blindly around GameStop hoping they pick something good.
This is all to say that maybe your parents were wrong about video games. They won’t make you go cross-eyed, they aren’t a waste of time, they won’t rot your brain, and they certainly won’t make you socially inept – quite the opposite. Games have saved us all in one way or another. From the dark times that cause us to question the world to developing a community of like-minded friends that you might never meet in real life, gaming can and will have an amazing impact on your life, even if you don’t realise it. So, next time somebody tells you to go touch grass, just smile at them like the moron they are.
