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Nerdarchy > At The Gaming Table  > Five Life Lessons Learned From Gaming

Five Life Lessons Learned From Gaming

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A group of role playing gamers enjoying a night session. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s no lie that we nerds have our own little niche subculture. Get a couple of us together and we will just start geeking out and enthusing about things we love, and for those not in the know, it can sound as though we’re speaking an entirely different language. Sometimes, we have whole conversations in letters.

“Let me tell you about this amazing RPG experience I had where we almost TPK’d and I was hanging on by like 1 HP and we won anyway. The loot drop was amazing ftw.”

Okay, so nobody actually sounds like that, but you get what I mean. It’s not just our lexicon, either. Our values are different, too. So today I want to talk about five things I’ve learned through gaming, and things I feel like gamers understand better than most people do.

5 – Repetition Can Be Worth It

Raise your hand if you’ve played a game where you had to spend more than an hour doing a repetitive task to get enough experience points, or herbs, or jigsaw puzzle pieces, or reputation with somebody to move on to the next thing you wanted to do. I’m willing to bet most of us have our proverbial hands up, and if you literally put your hand up on reading that, rest assured you’ve already made me smile. Bonus points if someone is giving you a weird look on the subway for it right now.

Seriously, though, whether your game of choice is an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or a handheld game like Pokemon, or you just really love table topping, odds are at one point or another you have had to grind for something you wanted.

While you’re doing it, it’s infuriating. You sink so much time into doing the same thing over and over again, your mind wanders, you contemplate giving up. And then you finish. Suddenly, that potion you needed all those herbs for is in your hand, or you are finally leveled up and ready to do that quest you didn’t have enough experience for before and everything just feels so, so worth it.

I’ll give you that some gamers are always going to detest grinding, but I for one became a much more patient person for having to do it.

What it Taught Me: You have to break things into pieces sometimes. You cannot just look at the big picture and tackle it all at once. If you want every single pokemon, you have to take them one at a time. If you want to finish that big recipe, you do it by gathering one reagent after another. In more real-life-applicable terms, if you want to finish a novel, you do it a chapter at a time. Minor progress might not feel like progress, but it is, and it’s worth it to keep going.

4 – How to Be a Team

“Oh no, she’s going to start talking about the power of friendship now.” Buckle up, because this isn’t going to be the last time in this article, either.

I’m sure a lot of us had the “bad at sports” experience as kids. There’s no shame in it, and for those lucky few that could do it, I respect and envy you. Me? Not so much. I was slow and not the most coordinated person in the world, so I missed out on a lot of that early life “this is how you pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of those around you and dominate the kids on the other side of the playground” programming.

Fortunately for me, I got it later on through gaming. Even better, in video games and at the D&D table, you aren’t restricted by what your real life body can do so you get to give every position on the field a try if you want to. When you know what tanking feels like, you know how to better help the person who is doing it if that person isn’t you. When you know how to be the healer, then you know what the healer wants you to do.

It isn’t just the heat of the moment, either. Sometimes you’ll be in the middle of a game of D&D and come across a non-combat encounter that you just know fits your friend who is playing a rogue better than it does your character, and it gives you this amazing opportunity to say, “Hey Harry, what can you do about this locked door?”

What it Taught Me: A party working together is stronger than a party working separately. In a game where people have classes and those classes fill roles, it is really easy to tell what someone will be best at, but before you knew what those roles were, you had to pay attention. Believe it or not, you’ve already got that skill set. What kind of people are the people around you? What are the signs when they’re holding up too much? When do you step in and heal, and when do you give them their space? When do you step in and strike, and when is it better to hang back and be support? Nerds have this stereotype of not being able to talk to people, but we’ve got this amazing toolkit for knowing how to acknowledge and stand by one another, and it’s built right into the source material.

3 – Rules are More Like Guidelines

So 90% of the time you’re going to want to look at the rules and follow them. Sometimes, though, you have this really cool idea that the rules don’t support. That’s not as easy to get around in a video game (unless you’re using cheat codes, not that I would ever do something like that), but in a tabletop you can always clear it with the DM.

There’s a trick to when and where to bend and break the rules. That trick often involves looking at the fallout; what happens when you do break the rules? How much trouble are you going to get into? Is it worth it? Is it going to break the game? Are you willing to deal with the consequences?

Use that cheat code and you won’t unlock this achievement, but you also won’t keep dying repeatedly. Carry a weapon that the city guard told you explicitly that you were not supposed to have, but come out on top when you get jumped. As a Dungeon Master, fudge a roll or two so the party doesn’t wipe. It’s not by the book, but having fun is more important than doing everything the way the pieces of paper say you are supposed to do it.

What it Taught Me: Rules aren’t about never, ever doing something; they are about whether or not it’s worth it to deal with the consequences afterward. Sometimes they’re about whether or not it’s worth it not to. Sometimes following the rules just isn’t worth the cost. It’s not worth losing a friend over. It’s not worth missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s not worth giving up your integrity for. You don’t have to be lawful to be good.

2 – The Importance of Platonic Friendships

I told you I wasn’t done talking about the power of friendship, didn’t I?

We live in a society that glorifies romantic love. It is plastered all over every movie and every book. Advertisements are full of kissing couples. Songs on the radio are full of people wailing about lovers who have failed them or someone they are trying to woo currently. I’m willing to bet you’ve had at least one older relative at least playfully ask you when you’re getting married. There’s even this pervading social stigma about the “friend zone,” as if platonic care and companionship is somehow less worthy than romance.

The world asks where you are without a mate, but games like D&D ask you where you are without the party.

It’s a great thing to have a friend you can lock eyes with and just know you’re in accordance with each other. It’s a great gift to be able to stand back to back with someone and know it’s do or die and that if you go down, you’re going down together.

What it Taught Me: There’s no replacement for a steadfast friendship. We as human beings are social creatures and we need to be around others because through our interactions we give each other meaning. You should always know who you would take with you into the dungeon, and to be one of those people is no consolation prize. It’s the greatest gift a person can give you.

1 – Dragons Can be Beaten

fantasy worldsSo there are problems in the world that look totally insurmountable. There are big and scary things out there that you just don’t want to go anywhere near because they are so much bigger than you or anyone you know.

No one faces down an ancient red dragon on their own.

You don’t go into that fight without preparing for it first. You don’t go charging at it one-on-one and expect to win. You acknowledge that sometimes the dragon’s going to get the better of you, and you fall back and regroup. Maybe you go do something else for a little while, but the lure of all that treasure and the knowledge of what that dragon is doing to the countryside will always lure you back.

Yes, that dragon is more powerful than you are. Yes, it whipped your buns once already. Yes, it has a good chance of sending you running screaming when you come into contact with it the next time.

But deep down you know you can beat it because that is the heart and soul of every story. It seems impossible, of course it does. It has to seem impossible because if what you were trying to do were easy, it wouldn’t be heroic.

What it Taught Me: It’s going to be a hard battle but it won’t always be impossible. You lick your wounds and get back up again. I know who I’m bringing into the dungeon with me and how we best work together, what we need to grind to prepare, and what rules we’re going to have to break to win the day. I think you do, too. So let me ask you, what’s your dragon?

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Robin Miller

Speculative fiction writer and part-time Dungeon Master Robin Miller lives in southern Ohio where they keep mostly nocturnal hours and enjoys life’s quiet moments. They have a deep love for occult things, antiques, herbalism, big floppy hats and the wonders of the small world (such as insects and arachnids), and they are happy to be owned by the beloved ghost of a black cat. Their fiction, such as The Chronicles of Drasule and the Nimbus Mysteries, can be found on Amazon.

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