What Video Games have taught me about Life

Beyond Good and Evil

Have you heard of this game? It’s for the Playstation 2 and oh, it’s a good one. You play as a photographer named Jade who is swept up in a crazy planet wide take over. An alien species invades your home and takes a few of your family members!

You use your camera to take photographic evidence that this alien race is working with none other – than the government! Of course. I learned to appreciate government conspiracies at a young age.

You explore the factories that are shipping your family to the moon and take pictures of the government leader, being in cahoots with the evil aliens!

You publish the pictures to the news and all of society is awakened from the lies they’ve been told! This definitely ignited my passion for spreading the truth and not trusting most authoritative groups.

I then proceeded to bawl my eyes out when I finished the game. 

World of Warcraft

Good ol’ WoW. I first played (and when I say played, I mean became horribly addicted) this game when I was a mere 10 year old. That was 10 years ago, which blows my mind.

This game really helped my spelling and communicative skills because I would play with 16 – 40+ year olds and I really wanted to seem older and mature. This game taught me people are amazingly nice and helpful, and upright mean as it gets. It taught me how to deal with people from a young age.

The dynamic of this game was crazy in terms of raiding. You have 40 people all working together to defeat virtual monsters, but the rewarding feeling was more than real. To know exactly where you need to be and (as a healer) support your friends, it really felt great.

I felt responsible and important even though it is a really time consuming game.

I remember once I was talking over the program “Ventrilo” to a few people in my guild and I was complaining about how I didn’t want to start a dungeon that I said I would commit to. My much older guild mates scolded me and told me “finish what you start” and that stuck with me. 

Little Big Planet

This is another fun game all about working together. If you’re in multiplayer, the levels are designed so there is something for each person to do in order to move on. If one person doesn’t corporate, no one gets to move on. This can be annoying if you’re playing with random people from around the world who purposefully try to mess you up (okay, sometimes I’d be that person.)

The cool thing about this game is, if you leave someone behind, you literally can’t continue on until you’re both running to the side of the screen. The screen won’t keep panning unless everyone is going together. It teaches how to work together in a simple and rewarding way.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t try to hit all the players with that frying pan you can equip, but I was usually a good hearted player! I love the idea of people from around the world coming together to participate in the same goal.