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Have you learned any real life skills from gaming?

Have you ever learned any real-world skills from playing games?


  • Total voters
    117

SmokedMeat

Gamer™
I learned to take corners fast when driving, then hit my brakes and slam into other vehicles to help make a turn.

I’ve also learned that if you show that you’re capable of handling tasks, you’ll be given everything while everyone else stands around with their thumb up their ass. All because you’re the only one that can be depended on.
 
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March Climber

Gold Member
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IAmRei

Member
There are lots for me

I can manage game studio because playing RTS

I can manage some skills in my life because JRPG

I learn english from JRPG

I learn lot to drive from GTA ( i play GTA legit immersive like in such real life )

I learn life is not flat from yakuza 1-2 in PS2

I learn to explore with legend of zelda

I learn defeat is other way to win in other day from souls series

For me, game is learning more things for life.
 
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SoloCamo

Member
Turns out that fast-paced intense games like that are a sharp exercise for the prefrontal cortex and aid in quick decision making and executive functions.
Yes, playing fast paced arena shooters (Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 99, etc.) really helped me with this. I always scored extremely well on eye tests when it came to spotting fast movements.

I learned to keep hoarding everything until i finally find some use for them.

This is one I wish I could unlearn.

Driving. I play a lot of racing games, and it taught me so much about how different cars actually drive. I scare the shit out of people when i'm driving them around.

Came here to post this. A lot of driving can be learned from games, yes even unrealistic ones. Just knowing the difference between how a RWD and FWD car handles alone put's you ahead of 90% of the people on the road sadly.

I have a career in IT because my dad got me a PC for gaming when I was 12. This started my passion for PC tinkering, upgrading, optimizing, re-imaging, etc.......

This as well. Without having a supportive family who understand technology to an extent I don't know if I'd ever have ended up in IT myself.
 
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Raven117

Gold Member
Have you ever learned any real-world skills from playing games? I’ve learned a couple.

-Playing MMOs taught me a lot of people skills.

-I learned how to type ridiculously fast playing MUDs when I was younger.

-Saving money is a skill I’ve helped to hone through playing GTA Vice City.

All of the above have helped me with school first, and later work. What about the rest of you?
Awesome avatar.

There are more (like some basics of aviation from flight simulator), but the one that surprised me was how to navigate Shibuya station.

I was visiting Japan for the first time and I had played Persona 5. When I got off the train and started to try and find my way around, I realized I had a basic sense of where I was due to the landmarks they used in the game version. It was a bizarre (and helpful) experience.
 

Crayon

Member
My friend was a marine and deployed in a hot area during desert storm. He was leading a small caravan of hummers through Fallujah when they got ambushed. While they were going straight, his truck had a refrigeration trailer for servers and he started losing it a bit.

Now, a trailer starting to jacknife is so hard to recover that it's not unreasonable to describe it as impossible. Somehow he straightened it out. He says that he's not sure he'd have been able to do it if it wasn't for the thousands of hours we spent playing gran turismo over the years.

Actually... we were both midnighters in the local canyon when we where younger and gran turismo was pretty much our only driving school... We were both pretty fast, though. >:0
 
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Language skills, problem solving, creative thinking, managing people, strategizing, race car driving... treating my work career like a videogame where I'm constantly leveling up and progressing helps finding motivation when a lot of people are happy to settle and take a "why bother" attitude.
I would say that video games contributed to me being a successful adult much more than any formal studies I undertook throughout my life.
 

Fredrik

Member
General computer knowledge. I learned msdos in early pc gaming, learned file systems and .exe and .bat files from fiddling with autoexec.bat etc when starting games.

Because of mostly Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 I learned english, basic, even some machine code, in general how to program, how to adjust the azimuth head on a cassette deck, basically how to type on a keyboard, how to backup floppy discs, use a joystick, use a mouse, draw pixelart, animate, make games, make music using multi channel trackers, midi, samplers, learned what framerates is, screen resolution, latency. Etc

Not sure how essential it is to know these things today but I learned things that makes younger coworkers think I’m some allknowing guru just because I dealed with 80s gaming computers when I was 9.

And coding basic programs and tweaking machine code to edit high score lists at that age has probably earned me some computer knowledge that those who played with other toys didn’t get.

The gaming interest in general made me learn JAVA too, I’m not a coder but I like games and when class mates in a JAVA course were happy to just place an image inside an applet box I went on to control the image with the keyboard and eventually made a game. Gaming has always pushed me to learn stuff I wouldn’t otherwise have learned.
 
I learned English in large part thanks to RPGs and now my work consists of writing in English and working with English-speaking people.

I also kinda manage to find my way in Dubai mall (biggest mall in the world) and my brother said it's because I play games, so maybe there's that too.
 
I learned a lot about PCs and even got into IT because of gaming. I started gaming when you still had to use the command prompt to start programs so by the time I went to college I already new how to use it in and out.
 

Crayon

Member
The driving school in Gran Turismo is pretty useful to teach people to find out the limits of their car and how it handles.

My friend is a single mom and dad got their ten year old a mini bike to practice in their big backyard. She called me because he kept running into shit lol. I walked her through setting up the first license test where you have to hit the brakes and stop in a box. She said it started working right away.
 

poodaddy

Gold Member
Absolutely I have. I played competitive Melee for around 20,000 hours, and I continued to have noticeably faster reaction times and better hand-eye coordination the more I played. Turns out that fast-paced intense games like that are a sharp exercise for the prefrontal cortex and aid in quick decision making and executive functions.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a dipshit. But I’m a quick dipshit.
This. Still to this day, at nearly 40, when my 12 year old daughter randomly decides to sidekick me when she's walking by, (she does often, I think to test me.... believe it or not we get along incredibly well lol), I can nearly always catch her leg with my opposing leg and move it aside. She's amazed by this and thinks I'm a ninja despite me being 240 pounds lol.
 

King Dazzar

Member
Yes. Likely reaffirmed some physics stuff from driving games. When my cars tail breaks traction I instinctively counter steer etc. And whilst that's primarily been learnt from real life time with my motorcycles and cars. I cant help but think that some of that instinctive reaction has been firmed up via gaming.
 

SoloCamo

Member
A lot of people mentioned learning English here... I will say my nephew pretty much grew up with tech and he reads far more advanced than he should be at his age. It was mostly him playing games forcing him to read to understand how to play (no siblings remotely close to his age to help).
 

SHA

Member
Talking with strangers who turn out aren't really strangers cause we share a lot in common, I understand who pretend this isn't the case, more power to them, but they can't ignore the fact there's no us in all this.
 

Roberts

Member
Navigate foreign territory without a map.

Long time ago me and my wife went on a holiday trip to Rome, on the first day ended up in a bar, got super drunk (supposedly 15 rum+cokes for myself alone), carried wife on my back and walked in a specific direction because I though my hotel could be somewhere there. I don't know why I didn't take a cab, but that is not important. Important bit is that I had a blackout on the way but came to my senses right next to our hotel and still don't know exactly how I got there. On the next day I found out that I walked more than one km. Don't dare to tell me it wasn't video games that saved my ass on that night!
 

SoloCamo

Member
Navigate foreign territory without a map.

Long time ago me and my wife went on a holiday trip to Rome, on the first day ended up in a bar, got super drunk (supposedly 15 rum+cokes for myself alone), carried wife on my back and walked in a specific direction because I though my hotel could be somewhere there. I don't know why I didn't take a cab, but that is not important. Important bit is that I had a blackout on the way but came to my senses right next to our hotel and still don't know exactly how I got there. On the next day I found out that I walked more than one km. Don't dare to tell me it wasn't video games that saved my ass on that night!

It was the rum compass, old sailor's guide that never lets you down.
 

StereoVsn

Member
I learned how to infiltrate secure facilities using nothing but a cardboard box.


On a more serious note, games helped me to learn English and Japanese. They also instilled love of IT where I built my career.

They also taught me to soup up my Honda Civic to win street tournaments back in a day. I kid… or do I?
 

StereoVsn

Member
I have started several businesses, but that entrepreneurship started when I realized at 10 years old that I could get good deals buying people's consoles and game collections, and then splitting them up and selling them piece by piece. I would never have done that if I was not collecting games. I made over 20k between the age of 10 and 17 doing this, and also ended up with a collection of 22 different consoles and over 3,000 games.

I have a career in IT because my dad got me a PC for gaming when I was 12. This started my passion for PC tinkering, upgrading, optimizing, re-imaging, etc.......

The only reason I know anything about how the rules in most sports work is because of video games (I only played basketball, but I understand pretty much all US sports)

I have great spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination, and I do think video games played a big part in that

This one is silly, but I'm going to Japan this Summer, and for the last year I've been on-off studying Japanese, but also playing through all the Yakuza games. I feel that playing Yakuza in Japanese has helped me in learning some Japanese.
Just remember your heat moves when Yakuza approach you to shake down for money! 😉
 
Learned english without the need of a course or something related. Also music (specially Nu Metal, Hardcore and Metalcore) helped me to improve my english a lot.
 

Crayon

Member
Navigate foreign territory without a map.

Long time ago me and my wife went on a holiday trip to Rome, on the first day ended up in a bar, got super drunk (supposedly 15 rum+cokes for myself alone), carried wife on my back and walked in a specific direction because I though my hotel could be somewhere there. I don't know why I didn't take a cab, but that is not important. Important bit is that I had a blackout on the way but came to my senses right next to our hotel and still don't know exactly how I got there. On the next day I found out that I walked more than one km. Don't dare to tell me it wasn't video games that saved my ass on that night!

Jeez this is giving me flashbacks. Luckily on both occasions I was in especially safe places. Only one was I significantly drunk. Both times that compass I learned to use from playing Ark pulled me out!!! The map used to have no indicators, even of where you are so that compass was clutch.
 
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