A Non-Gamer's Thoughts on Gaming

When it comes to video games, I'm a complete novice. I've dabbled in League of Legends and Wii Sports, but that's about the extent of what I've played. I grew up being told that games would melt my brain and would make me violent, and was kept away from them as a result. Any gaming system I had came with a lot of rules and time restrictions.

It wasn't until my 20s that I started playing games when I would spend time with friends that played. Even then, I'd mostly watch and ask questions, more interested in the world and the lore than the actual game play itself. I learned very quickly that I am terrible at the majority of games out there. It's not because of lack of practice, but because I never had outlets to learn a lot of skills that develop with gaming: problem solving, patience, hand-eye coordination just to name a few.

Then I fell in love with a man who plays video games daily. It's how he blows off steam and satisfies those needs for creativity, mental challenge, and entertainment in the boring world of adulthood. He sees in games what I see in my interest in TV and movies—storytelling, humor, community, a sense of belonging to something outside of the regular world. I've learned to appreciate games that I previously would have thought included senseless violence for the sake of violence.

I've learned a lot about the gaming community from an outsider's perspective in my years of freedom from my parents' rules and judgments of games that have left me feeling like I've missed out on a lot. So, maybe, a list of the most important things can spark a conversation about the realities around the culture of gaming.

1. Life Skills

This seems like a really lame thing to start with that will probably piss off some anti-gaming nuts, but it's absolutely the truth, but there are a lot of skills that can be developed more in-depth with gaming than just in school. The two the stick out the most I mentioned above: problem solving and patience.

We learn problem solving throughout life with school, and just simply existing, but there is a depth that games have brought to it that I missed out on in my formative years. I like to think that I have the skills developed more fully in other ways (like story building, since that was my outlet as a kid and adult), but gaming has a lot of practicality in the problems presented.

I've watched my boyfriend play through quite a few of his favorite games, and he always sees things in those games differently than I do. Even with games that are new, like Crash Team Racing for example, he approaches things, and sees things differently. He finds solutions to getting all the letters in the CTR races with quick, keen observation, while I just see the letters, fail to get them, and just chalk it up to "well, I can't drift so I'm not going to succeed anyway, just have fun!"

His problem solving skills blow me away when the console is off. A simple thing of how to hang a paper towel holder without a drill was resolved in the time it took for me to look for a screwdriver. He changed the plug on our new dryer and put it in the very tight space without any assistance, even though I told him I would be more than happy to help. He sees a problem and finds ways to fix them (usually taking in my input), and then resolves it with an ease that I would never have.

When it comes to patience, I think he'd disagree he has any. We have talked about that he had more with games when he was a kid than he does now, but I have to disagree on that. I had a few gaming systems growing up (after much bargaining and restriction on the games I could play), and I remember on every single one turning it off when things got too hard and starting over again. I have yet to finish the first Pokemon game for GameBoy to this day, and I got it the day it came out.

Patience is something that he learned from being allowed to play games, from an environment that fostered his interest in gaming instead of squashing it with unsubstantiated bias (yes, my mom is a "games melt the brain" believer). His patience extends beyond the realm of games and into the real world. I know he has to have a lot to put up with me, and I love him for it. I will thank any and every single thing that even remotely curated a high patience level for that. But it also expands into his driving, his work, his family, everything that strives to test him to the utmost degree.

2. Violence

In the wake of the mass shootings, the media has been back to blaming video games. I used to believe there was at least some correlation to it before I actually understood the science behind the brain, and the studies that claimed the opposite.

Now, however, I've sat through many play-throughs of games that are violent, and I've seen that the violence isn't there simply to be violent in a lot of these games. People who have the desire to hurt people will always find a way to do that, regardless of the access to video games or other media that portrays the violence.

My favorite play-through I've seen yet is Gears of War. It's a first-person shooter game, on the surface, so yeah it's violent. I've always watched the boyfriend play through the first Halo, a Batman game, and Fallout 76 quite a bit. They all have the same thing in common: fighting for a cause that is ultimately going to help humanity.

I've learned that the violence in video games that I've seen have a purpose, that it wasn't an initial reaction to the situation in the game. These games have encouraged diplomacy before physical reaction. In Gears, the goal became genocide of a species that was trying to take over a planet from the inside out, sure, but the humans were trying to protect themselves as this species was doing just the same to them. And then it became something more when some of the Locus were actually sick from the humans' fuel source. In Halo (I've only sat through the first one fully), it was disease that would infect all sentient life, so what was done had to be done, not just for humanity, but for life in the universe. Fallout is preservation of what's left of humanity after, well, humanity destroyed it.

Games, like books and movies and shows, have to have a purpose, a story to solve. I knew that before actually taking the time to understand them more, but I didn't appreciate games as a form of entertainment that needed the same structures of storytelling too.

3. Storytelling

I've been a writer all my life, so I appreciate the art of creating a world and characters, of creating chaos in that world, and finding ways to fix it. I love the process of the craft, the building blocks (words, grammar), the way a good story is universal. I also appreciate the visual aspects of storytelling, of expressing emotions with the muscles in the face and tone of voice, of living the action of saving the little slice of world in that story. I love the fandom communities that develop around beloved stories, be it a book or a movie or a TV series, a comic book or graphic novel.

Video games take all the elements of story telling I love and mash them together into something new, like combining different colors of clay and molding it together in a swirl of color and shape. That's what I loved about Gears of War the most was that it was a visually unbelievable world with a compelling story. I literally cried in the Gears 2 cut scene with Dom's wife. I never expected a video game to elicit an emotion like that from me the way other visual media stories have. I really had connected with the players, but in a way that you can't get from a movie. I may not have been playing, but I had watched everything from Marcus fighting for the cause alongside Dom and Baird and Cole Train, literally going through it all step by step. I didn't expect to feel such a kinship for them until it came time to lose them (or almost lose them).

Video games are like reading a novel, experiencing more of the nitty-gritty details left out of movies and TV shows—but with the visual satisfaction of movies and TV. It's something that is missed out on—people like me who have never had the opportunity to play video games in the years where they'd make the most impact.

4. Community

I know that gaming has a reputation of being toxic at times when it comes the community. I've dabbled in League of Legends and have seen first hand how nasty people can get about things. But, those are with strangers who have the luxury of anonymity.

When I say "community," I mean the friends that play together all the time. My boyfriend is still connected to people he went to high school with through them playing together. They're all over the country, but have found ways to come back together to run missions in Fallout or goof off with Gang Beasts. It makes him happy to have some time with the boys he may not otherwise have without the connection of the games (and the internet).

Even when he's not playing with his friends and he's showing me games he loves, it's building something between us too. I am indulging him in his hobbies and things he loves, and really enjoying it. I may not play (because I've already shown I get frustrated easily and hand the controller back to him), but it's a little bonding time for something that makes him happy.

5. And I quote... "hand dexterity."

Everything has been positive about the gaming community up to this point, of how games benefit the players. But how about how those gaming skills have benefited me?

Let me tell you ladies—if you can find yourself a gamer that knows where to touch on your body to bring on that Big O, then count yourself lucky. The best orgasms I've had in my life have come from the hands of my gaming boyfriend.

He says that gaming all his life has given him hand dexterity, so that they won't tire out as quickly when he's finishing me off. He literally has me shaking parts of my body that I never dreamed were connected down there. Whatever it is, it's truly incredible.

Gaming really is something I missed out on growing up, but get to enjoy now in my adult years. I'll probably never learn patience on the same level as a daily gamer, but I've learned to appreciate the craft involved with making them, and what comes out through those holding the controllers. It's not all bad like the media (and my parents) say; they're just missing the point to a couple of sound bites.