Videos Games Are The New Mind Stimulant
Videos games have always had a negative reputation, until now. Some studies show that video games cause more aggression in teens, addictive behavior, poor academic performance, and have been known to “rot your brain”. However, they can actually be stimulating your mind and positively influencing the rest of your life. In the article “Top 10 Ways Video Games Can Improve Real Life”, it explains the main ways video games can help you learn valuable skills. These skills include learning personal accountability, learning how to deal with people in real life, exercising your brain and improving problem-solving skills, relaxing and relieving anxiety and stress, meeting new people, getting better at multi-tasking, learning how to start over and let go, getting into a good workflow, rewiring your brain for happiness and positivity, and overall leveling up your entire life. These qualities are very important because every situation you face can look like a game where there are certain players or people involved, each player has different strategies or actions they can take, and each strategy has different payoffs that result in a positive or negative outcome. Therefore, I agree that video games are giving users valuable skills, and the stigma around playing them should change.
The strategy skills learned from video games directly relate to concepts of game theory. One of the main things you learn from playing video games is how to strategically plan out your actions. You have to learn how to use a better strategy to win the game and that is directly coming from the main aspects of game theory, including best responses and dominant strategies. Players learn their best responses and how to work with other people in multiplayer games. They must create the best move based on what they think their opponent is going to do and this true when competing against anyone in the real world too. In addition, players learn personal accountability and dominant strategies because it is crucial to focus on their own actions what they can do to improve their own situations. In life sometimes all you can do is focus on yourself and this is very similar to having a dominant strategy because your actions are the best responses to every strategy of your opponents.
In learning about games, reasoning, and behavior you can see that playing video games directly correlates to learning different aspects of game theory. Game theory can be applied to every interaction you have and can help you learn behavior that will ensure success. Therefore, the negative stigma around video games should be overpowered by the great qualities it can bring to the players. Overall, I hope after reading this you may be picking up a few video games yourself to brush up on some much-needed real-life strategy skills.
Source: https://lifehacker.com/top-10-ways-video-games-can-improve-real-life-1711093093