5 Real Life Skills Gaming Taught Me

There’s an invariable amount of knowledge to be had when you amass the thousands upon thousands of hours of gaming in a gamer’s life. For years there’s been a number of attempts, both successful and not, to brand a form of gaming as particularly educational and market them to kids, particularly those of which have parents that are more stringent about the way their children spend their time in front of a screen. Here’s my short list of five skills that have been ingrained in me through gaming, mostly through indirect subsidiary parts of major franchise titles. 5. How to Read a Map What them squiggly lines be about, b?   Maps are a basic part of games across countless genres. Maps are used in game to relay landscape, resource, quest, story line, and territorial claims among countless other variations that cater to what a game designer may feel necessary to convey to the gamer. Though there’s precedent for reading maps, particularly in urban areas, via Google Maps or something of the like, there aren’t many people that I’ve met that can truly read a topographical map. Just consider you’re dropped into the middle of nowhere and you’re given nothing but a map of the immediate 10 mile radius around you, I don’t imagine there’s many folks in both urban and suburban areas that can even locate where they are on that map given the context of the landscape, topography, and direction they’re placed. Through gaming I’ve honed this skill solely because that’s exactly what many games …