“GAMING”

More Than Just A Game

We see them, our children, consumed in their phone, iPad, computer or PS5, and wonder how they can be whittling their lives away playing some silly game. Yet, there is so much to gaming that is very hard to comprehend… unless you've lived that life, had those experiences.

Written by Matt Davis

IT Manager

I started when I was young, in the early 1990’s, playing Mario and Sonic games. Hours upon hours jumping on Goombas and Koopa Troopers. Mario Cart on the Super Nintendo was a tour-de-force in commitment to get to 100% completion. I’m still not sure my brother and I ever got there. The Legend of Zelda, rescuing princesses and defeating the evil Ganon (with the help of a game guide admittedly), and dozens of other games.

Our first personal computer came in Year 5, and it changed gaming for me, forever. Doom was the start, fighting back the demons of hell, then Duke Nukem 3d –the best one-liners from a game ever, Australian-produced Dark Reign, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Total Annihilation, the list goes on.

Then, I encountered the first game that truly changed my world – Half-Life. How did this one game make such an impact on my world? It was the very first game I experienced where I became deeply invested in the story – I experienced that game as an interactive movie. I spent hours as Freeman, escaping Black Mesa, and trying to seal the portal to another dimension.

That’s the power of games – they bring the player to an experience that’s unique. It’s not all about guns, explosions, cars, and creepers, it transcends the screen and keyboard and becomes an immersive experience. This is why we lose our kids for hours on a screen, because they are immersing themselves in a story in the same way that they would if they were playing in the treehouse outside. Why watch, when you can experience, when your choices can change the story itself?

Half-Life’s impact was two-fold for me. It had a strong modding community – a community that used the base Half-Life game to build new games from the player’s imaginations. Through the process of trying to build a mod, and admittedly failing, I learnt to program. As an aside, my brother, who was working on the same mod, learnt digital drawing and animation. He’s now a professional 3d Animator, and I went on to program for 4 years during my career in IT.

Half-Life started my journey into the online gaming world as well, with mods such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, both games that exist in a similar fashion today, some 25 years later.

Then… I started playing a game called World of Warcraft (WoW).

WoW was first released in 2004 and millions of players continue to play even today. It follows the story of two factions, the Alliance, and the Horde. Each are comprised of multiple races (humans, orcs, dwarfs, undead and many more), and for almost two decades the Horde and Alliance have fought each other for survival. Each race has its own backstory, aesthetic, home city and even language. The game is so immersive that when an Alliance and Horde character are standing side-by-side and they type messages to each other, the game will translate what the players type into a foreign language. These two factions are both enemy and ally, with a constant undercurrent of friction and eons of mistrust, counterbalanced with world-ending threats that the factions will seek to destroy to save the planet.

I was late to the game, with it being almost a decade old when I started playing. I had watched many of my friends lose years of their lives to this game, and I had flatly refused to take.

At this point in my life, I had young children, so going out was no longer an option, and my other friends were also in a similar place in their lives. Money was tight, the game was not expensive ($15/ month), and my co-workers at the time were extolling the new expansion. So, I finally took the plunge and went on a trip to Azeroth. That trip lasted almost 5 years. Some days I still consider going back, just for a look around.

Half-Life was an immersive story - WoW is an immersive universe. Spanning multiple continents, multiple dimensions and stories, players in WoW have thousands and thousands of hours of content to experience.

I asked my co-workers, for my birthday, to buy me a 30-day WoW subscription so I could finally experience the adventure. I signed up, created and named my character, logged into Azeroth for the first time, and as ‘retsef’ an orange-haired dwarf warrior with a long-braided beard, I was quickly defending the small dwarven camp from an onslaught of Rockjaw Troggs for my very first quest. For my hard work I was rewarded a pair of plate mail leggings.

I played through the story of the Dwarven holds and assisted in their struggles to fight off the evil besieging them. Once I had defeated the evil there, I was off on my next adventure, arriving at the Dwarven capital city of Ironforge, then onto the capital of the Alliance, Stormwind Castle to meet the king of humans.

After a couple of weeks of gameplay, I was maximum level. In most games, that signals the end of the play experience, but in WoW, the levelling process teaches you how to play your class. Level 90 wasn’t the end; it was the beginning. The endgame content is where players spend almost all their time in World of Warcraft. Endgame content is group-based content, where players must work as a team to beat monsters, dungeons, and events much stronger than each player can accomplish individually. While you can play through the instances with randomly assigned players, communication soon becomes the key to success. The real experiences begin when players need to co-operate. This is where the guild comes in.

A guild is a group of people who share similar goals in the game, some play casually and carefree, some form tightknit communities to destroy the hardest of dungeons and bosses. Some of my guildmates were people I knew in real life.

My at-the-time boss was guild-leader, as was two of my co-workers. Most of my guild-members, however, were not people I had met, or ever would meet.

The guild I started my journey in was a LGBT friendly guild, as the guild’s originator, my co-worker at the time, is in that category. This was one of my first experiences with this community. It was entirely positive, friendly, welcoming, and enlightening. I learnt so much in a short amount of time about the community, the challenges they experience, my own biases, and the language I used that needed to change. I was introduced to Jack, who only recently began transitioning to his new body. I remember him being excited about his first scruffs of beard after his hormone replacement therapy. All due to a silly computer game, I had to confront my preconceived notions and biases, and become, hopefully, a better human being.

So as a guild, we were casual players, but a few of us wanted to look at the hardest of endgame content – known as raids. Raids are 10 to 25-man content, meaning that they are designed to be done by a group of between 10 and 25 players (there is automatic scaling based on player numbers), with each player taking on a role, either tank, healer, or damage dealer. Each boss in the raid, and there’s usually 8 - 12, has a set of mechanics, or attacks/movements/abilities that it does. Co-ordinating the team of 10 players you have never met, nor likely will ever meet is a life skill that I am forever grateful to have gained. For any ex-players reading this at home, potentially yelling at the magazine, I admit that the original raids were 40-player content and even harder again to co-ordinate.

I’m sure everyone reading this has played on a sports team of some type. In a team there are leaders, there are followers, there are social rules, good players and bad. Nothing changes on the internet, except that nobody knows what each other looks like, and all communication is done by voice without any body language. Raids, effectively competitive gaming in WoW’s sense, are high stress. One mistake leads to all players dying and having to start again, called a wipe, with the boss back to full health. A boss fight might run for 6 - 10 minutes, and a night’s raid session is usually about 3 hours. Quick maths leads you to think this shouldn’t be an issue to get done, but I can honestly say that some bosses have taken many weeks of 3-hour nights to get killed. Ultimately, it’s a co-ordinated dance, with each player taking a role, a responsibility, and being a potential point of failure. One misstep, one person on the right when they need to be left, or one person accidentally standing in fire (a common mechanic), and it’s all-overred-rover.

The life skill this taught me was leadership. How do you lead 10 players through highstress situations, where the connection to each other is tenuous at best, and to walk away in frustration is as simple as pressing the power off button on your PC? How do you make them come back next week? How do you, as raid leader, manage to lead the raid, giving instructions calmly, systematically, and without mistake while still multi-tasking your own set of actions? How do you defuse situations between players upset that the Night-Elf Priest had the wrong equipment on, or forgot to cast the right spell at the right time, for the 10th failure in a row?

It sounds ridiculous, but every ex-raid leader I know in real life (and I know a couple), tell the same story. Levelheadedness under stressful situations, people skills, reading into situations over 1000km away, building relationships, planning, managing, organising, resource management, are all skills that I learnt and refined in the crucible of battle – albeit a digital one.

This was all due to a silly computer game. I learnt leadership in a computer game.

Let me circle back around to our kids - the power of WoW, and most of the games our kids are playing, are the people they play with. Leaving a game like WoW is not just stopping playing, it’s leaving a team, it is losing friends, it becomes so much more than a game. So, before you get upset your kids are playing games all the time, consider that there are alternative skills being learnt.

My sons play solo, but really get engaged when they are playing with their friends. When my eldest son’s best friend left and went interstate, gaming is how they stay in contact. Now my son has made friends with his friend’s friends, people he is likely never to meet but otherwise has connection with.

“But!” I hear you say, “my child only plays silly single player games on the iPad”. Even the most basic single player game still teaches problem solving skills, resource management (in-game coins/ gems/etc), hand-eye co-ordination and trains reaction time. Minecraft teaches construction skills, Angry Birds uses physics, Fortnite teaches mouse-accuracy, reaction time and self-management under

Pros:

1. Improved cognitive functions

2. Problem-solving skills and the use of logic

3. Hand-to-eye coordination

4. Faster and more accurate decisionmaking

5. Improved eye for details

6. Social activity and teamwork high-stress situations, and games where players put makeup on dolls teaches colour matching and other artistic skills.

I must make it clear though, this article is not meant to be a treatise on unlimited gaming time for your student. As a parent I limit my children’s access to technology. During the school week, there is no technology, and as a family we don’t even watch TV, so when I say no technology, I mean that. On weekends the ban lifts at 10:30am, and they are allowed to play what they want, in the communal, public, family hobby space. I am a technologist, but I understand the impact that instant gratification has on humans. I remember the games I played, including WoW, playing with my brain’s reward centres, drip-feeding success just enough to keep me engaged. Another level, another hour, another round.

So don’t demonise gaming, but don’t glorify it. As a parent, definite parent, but let your gamers game.

Cons:

1. Video games can make you addicted

2. Elevated risk of aggression

3. Games replace real-world problems

4. Some games promote gambling

5. Decreased physical and mental health

6. Lack of focus and concentration https://gamequitters.com/pros-and-cons-of-video-games/