7 Life Lessons I Learned Playing Video Games

Games, just like life, have a competitive component to them. But being obsessive, strict, and narrowly-focused on one thing to the exclusion of everything else is not the way to go if you want to be truly happy. Gaming is often just about feeling good, having fun, and being fulfilled and content at the end of the day.

Thinking for yourself and going outside your comfort zone might lead you to untold treasures.

Just as you will often find a rare and incredibly powerful item in a random closet, you can find a job or a new relationship in unexpected places. You’ll never know what you may find if you don’t go out there and explore.

There are rules to everything, and understanding the underlying system, makes it easy to find loopholes and exploit them.

In real life, there are many predictable situations and in most cases there is an easier way to overcome them if you know they are coming. You have to pay attention and exploit them within reason.

To get good at a game, you need to get to know the rules of the universe well and to develop the necessary skills. To do this, you need to fail many times.

Once you get into this mindset of “failure is merely a teaching tool,” you’ll start to apply it to other aspects of life without even realizing it. You can develop a lot of patience and focus if you go through life as if you were playing an RPG.

Sometimes you get stuck in a rut for hours before you ultimately complete an objective. But there is a feeling of utter joy when you finally accomplish something that seemed impossible for a long time.

Video games teach that sometimes you need to grind through a lot of frustrating work that may seem meaningless to get to a sense of achievement.

There often comes a point in a game where you find yourself stuck. But eventually you learn that having patience and giving it time is better than despairing. 

When facing a hard challenge in real life, take some time off, do something else and try to think of different solutions to the problem after your brain has relaxed for some 10-20 minutes. 

As kids, we are taught not to talk to stranger and be on our guard, but as we age we become less distrustful. And that’s not always for the better.

As choosing an easy to decipher password or trusting a stranger with your online items will show, there are many scammers out there waiting to pray on your compassion and trusting nature.