When I was a child I thought my life was an adventure video game. That the life I had was in a budding state before becoming the main character of a great and epic adventure, in which I would travel the world, meet lots of curious characters, learn awesome skills and challenge big enemies, fighting heroic battles.
The time passed and it wasn't like that. I grew up and almost without notice I entered into something that can be called "a young man's life". In parallel, I kept playing, maybe innocently hoping to scape from reality, nourishing my hobby, sharing with friends and creating complicity links with new people as we shared some common game experiences.
However, something stayed with me: the skills and learning transference. If still not direct and widely researched, the skills that one acquires playing video games can be transferred to everyday life, having great impact on several dimensions of it.
For example, in RPG games there always exist a system of advancement and progression for character skills, such as "espers", "materia" or similar, which induce to learn to manage an adequate equilibrium among different skills. With such a focus, one can transfer that management to capitalize activities that were once a hobby -like organizing role playing meetings or keeping a blog about my favorite band- into "team management skills and communications".
Another memorable experience was my intuitive approach to scientific method. My first game that I played from end to end was Sonic The Hedgehog 2. When I realized that you can transform Sonic in Super Sonic I wondered "Can Tails become SUPER TAILS?". The answer is, unfortunately, no.
- Don't bother, it's not gonna work ¬¬
I refused to believe that all the emeralds and Tails had no relation at all. So I separated all the game instances: the emeralds, where I was getting them, finishing the game with them, etc. to find out if there were anything further between the emeralds and Tails. The answer: No relations at all. However, something stayed with me: I asked questions, formulated hypotheses, delimited the way to approach them, I played (experimented) and answered my questions, asked new ones, and so on.
One more example was the glorious summer of 1998 when I played Mario Kart 64 with almost military discipline. Four friends, four controls, a whole summer. Once all the basic skills, items, shortcuts and related stuff was learned, the game turned into a "psychological war".
To win the races, the game was requiring from me to enter my friends minds and to anticipate what they were also anticipating from me. This is also commonly seen on RTS games, FPS, fighting games, and any multiplayer game, where we can extract great lessons on empathy.
Adult life is increasingly flooded with complexities that overwhelm us and worry us incessantly, demanding answers in situations that we never faced before. Those of us who "wasted our childhood playing video games" tackled at bounded scope many of these situations and had grown in time an intuition to face them, sometimes performing even better than those who have never played video games.
Is there any skill of yours you consider is inspired from a video game?
I had a similar experience as you playing Mario Kart 64 with my friends as well, not to mention Perfect Dark and the original Super Smash Bros.
I read somewhere that people who play video games are more likely to be lucid dreamers and less likely to have nightmares, because FPS mechanics that are ingrained into our brain allow us to better defend ourselves or at least imagine defending ourselves in dreams. I've only had one experience like this, in a dream where I eventually came to a clearing with a scary man with a gun, who accidentally dropped the gun, and I remembering picking it up and seeing that outline of the gun on the right as you would if you picked up the glock in Half Life 2.
I'm not sure exactly what the effects of being exposed to relatively realistic video games (as in, children of the 90s, not the 8-bit 80s) at a young age are; I suppose we will find out as we get older. Perhaps it lends to us an advantage in learning the ins and outs of abstract systems; I find even advanced programming classes to be relatively easy, and I notice that the older people are in these classes, the more trouble they seem to have. Just some thoughts, anyway!
I think I've learned about flexibility of approach from video games. I have low-grade Asperger's syndrome, and as such I can get a bit fixed in ideas: "If I do X, then Y must happen." Games are a fun non-threatening environment to learn that quite a lot of the time Y doesn't happen! And banging your head against the wall by trying X over and over again isn't going to make any difference. You've got to go back and think of a completely new strategy to try.
The main problem with Asperger's, as you may know, is difficulty in dealing with other people because they're hard to understand. I find any kind of fiction very educational -- it's much easier to figure out the motives and feelings of fictional characters than real people. Games with complex but realistic character interaction are good for this kind of education. For instance, it's a trait of Asperger's to take what people say at face value; it's a difficult thing to learn that people can lie or manipulate, and it can only be learned from repeated experience. It's a lot better to have this kind of hard lesson in a game than in real life.
I also have innate tendencies to start things and then lose interest. This is a problem I'm trying to work on, and games are a big part of my self-imposed "therapy". If I start a game nowadays, I make a point to finish it. Since a good game contains a clear goal and a definite end-point, with increasing rewards leading up to the final major reward, I get lots of reinforcement for seeing it through to the end. I'm sure this will be very helpful in training me to follow through with other projects.
Even though it is difficult to say which comes first, like my teen son prefers strategy games because he is analytical or has developed his analytical abilities from playing strategy games, it cannot be argued that well-made video games provide residuals that can be used in everyday life.
That totally changed my way of playing, making me squizzing every coin and bonus possible out of the game, faster and with auto-inflicted difficulty every time (I passed out the World 8 with a frog once). All the other games was boring and dull because they didn't have so many tricks and bonuses IMO.
Well, the thing is that I was able to transfer that concept in real life; methods can be perfected with a lot of practice. The speed, the searching for making things faster and better and the searching for "bonuses" all the time was something that helped me in every job that I had.
BTW, sorry all for my lousy english.
Álex
http://bitexttech.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/video-games-and-transferrable-skills-
a-parody/