1) Grinding happens in real life.
Remember when you wanted to go into the second dungeon on
the Legend of Zelda, but before you could reasonably expect to survive, you
needed one of those big shields?
No, the *big* one - that just looks like a bible.
Which makes me wonder - was there some
Hyrulean Jesus they never mentioned?
What's *up* with that?!
Well, even in a world where old men hand out
wooden swords to impish children who wander into a cave, big shields cost
money. And money in Hyrule meant rupees (because Hyrule, as we all know, is a
small, monster-infested suburb of Calcutta). And rupees only came from slaying
beasts. This all adds up to what they call “grinding” in the world of gaming,
and “work” anywhere else. It took a long time, it wasn’t particularly
enjoyable, and it paid far less well than you’d imagine slaying monsters with a
wooden sword should pay (though it beats working at a call-center for tech
support, which was cut from the original Zelda as a side-quest).
"Octorok" is Hindi for "I have 8 jobs, and I'm still poor."
Now, I find myself poring over blank 1040s when doing taxes,
or sitting down to a pile of grading that needs to be done over the weekend,
and I can almost hear the 8-bit orchestra trill Link’s anthem as he stalks the
Oktoroks, Leevers, and whatever those gray troll-looking things are called. For
whatever parts of my job I enjoy that exist, there’s always a disproportionate
amount of grinding that needs to be done. This is true with every job, and if
it weren’t for the patience I’d learned collecting the ridiculous amount of
rupees needed to recover from a damn Like-Like eating my shield, I wouldn’t
have been nearly as mentally prepared for the doldrums of paperwork that
inevitably worm their way into adult life like, well, worms. Which you also
have to kill in a lot of games. And in stray baby kittens, but that’s a
different life-lesson.
"Doo-doooo; da-da-da-dee-da-dummmmm"
2) Leveling up happens in real life.
Any RPG-er can tell you that a hero at the beginning of a
quest is no more than monster-bait for any creature s/he will encounter more
than a few hundred yards from where s/he starts. All the pluck and moxie in the
world won’t get that hero beyond the myriad creatures specifically designed to
be cruelly and heartlessly deadly to anything that hasn’t progressed to level
5, and the only prescription for getting to that level is killing hoardes of
smaller creatures – usually some kind of blob or bird – again and again until
enough experience is collected. To people who question this aspect of gaming as
potentially irrelevant and meaningless in the overall scope of things, I say
this: try going to college.
Red Slime: The Dragon Warrior's answer to your 100-level Biology course.
Take a look at the requirements for a degree at any
University ever, and it quickly becomes a list of leveling requirements.
Replace “units” with “experience points,” and suddenly the task of earning a
Bachelor’s of Arts is tantamount to working your way through slimes, wyverns,
and giant rats in Dragon Warrior before tackling the larger creatures (or the
upper-division courses) in later stages. Just as it’s recommended that you
attain level 10 before trying to slay the fire-beast in the western caves, it’s
suggested that you have at least 80 undergraduate units before tackling PH-301:
The Philosophy of Dumbledoor (so it’s a Liberal Arts college, what?).
At first glance, you could barely tell the difference between these, couldn't you?
(Hint: the one on the right is from a college-schedule)
The
structure and hierarchy of college life is almost identical to the leveling-up
process in the gaming universe, and getting used to that process at an early
stage of development by playing video games can prepare you for the quiet
frustration of having to do yet another
five-page term paper on the significance of so-and-so in this-or-that, and thus
another way that gamers are better prepared for life. Plus, you also learn that
even though you think getting drunk before tackling a monotonous task like
writing a paper or slaying feral slugs will help, you usually wind up straying
far off-topic and getting yourself stuck in a losing situation.
3) People-skills matter.
So, you walk into a town after slaying an orc army the size
of which could easily take over most small countries that you can think of, and
you want nothing more than to find an inn to rest your weary virtual bones, and
suddenly you’re confronted with a horde of wandering chatterboxes, each bent on
specifically turning your ear for a short conversation about their problems and their little worries. Furthermore, you have no way of
telling which of these people are actually important, and which of them are
just wasting your precious time with some pointless monologue about some arcane
bit of knowledge that you’ll never need to know again for the rest of either
your in-game or actual lifetime. How can this possibly provide any preparation
for life in the “real world”?
Which one of these people will get you fired?
(My bet's on the guy in the sweatshirt)
Welcome to the first day of your new job. You’ll find that
it’s exactly like wandering into the
digital hamlets of your misspent video-game youth, as you are presented with
dozens of various co-workers and superiors and subordinates (okay, probably not
subordinates, but people you don’t really have to care about, let’s say). Sure,
they have titles and desks and offices and appear somewhere on your HR’s secret
hierarchy of who’s ass you have to kiss first and best, but you never know just who is really the boss’s best friend, or
which of your co-workers to divulge personal information to, or whether the
secretary is actually banging the VP, or if the janitor who does a suspiciously
poor job on the weekends is hoarding a secret video of the CEO banging an
underage Latvian altar-boy atop the file-cabinet (she’s very limber – aha, you
didn’t think of the CEO as a woman, did you? Sexist!). No, just like in-game
townships, you actually have to talk to these people, whether it be during lunchtime chitchat or in various
furtive e-mails that you have to triple-check the cc and bcc on, and you’ll
never really know who is important to your quest in advancing your career until
you’ve wasted a whole lot of time finding out that even though the chief
accountant goes to your boss’s church, he burned a bridge long ago when he
snubbed him in a softball game during the 1987 company picnic, and lost all
influence after that. There goes a year of water-cooler gossip down the drain,
and spending all that time pressing buttons to scroll through vapid dialogue
with NPCs suddenly seems like pretty good training for life.
4) You can’t take it with you.
So, you’re standing in front of the final boss chamber,
perusing your inventory, reflecting on the epic quest you are about to
complete, deciding which of your impressive arsenal would be the best weapon to
use, and – wait – what is that thing? A stick? Why did you pick that up? And
just how many red gems do you have? Do you even need that many? Why did you
spend all that gold on those arrows? Criminey – just look at all the gold you still have – what good is that
now? Can you buy some kind of after-game day-spa treatment, or maybe a post-win
handy with it? No. No, you can’t.
I dare you to tell me what that lobster in the lower-right is for. I double-dare you.
It’s of absolutely no use, unless the game is
handing out trophies for ambling around with your pockets stuffed full of crap
you thought might be important but turned out to be so much virtual chaff
(which it just might be, if it was released within the past few years). This is
what I like to call a “gamer’s existentialist crisis,” and it’s the same lesson
that Stephen M. Pollan is charging people actual money to read about in his
book: “Die Broke.” The lesson is this: die broke (didn’t see that one coming,
did you?).
Yes, as you stare through the comic-book store window at
that inflatable Macross Valkyrie, absolutely convinced that it is essential to
maintaining your nerdpiness (that’s “nerd-happiness,” you weirdo – not the
other thing you were thinking; that’s an entirely different inflatable doll
several storefronts down), it would be good to think back on all the unexploded
bombs, un-imbibed potions, and unspent hordes of gems, gold-pieces, or
bottlecaps that you have witnessed disappear into the inky bog of nonexistence
after completing yet another Herculean task in the gaming universe. Where would
you even put it? Do you have a special place picked out on your shelf? No, you
don’t. It’s a mess in your apartment, and you’d just have to clean up all those
empty pizza-boxes and Mountain Dew cans to make room for what inevitably will
become just another thing to put out in the yard sale before you have to move
again. So, take a lesson from your gaming experience, and consult the wiki: do
you really need this thing to complete
your quest, or is it just another distraction programmed in to add a
meaningless few hours to the completion-time? Think about it…
Note how it doesn't say "Do Need" - as in "I, Brian Posehn, *do need* more airtime and recognition for my unique and relevant comedy routines." What - I like him, don't you?
5) ) Don’t throw things away without checking.
The flip side of the coin, of course, is when you’re
standing in front of the final boss’ chamber, and you have this sinking
suspicion that you forgot something, but you storm on in, and save your
progress – only to render your game completely un-winnable because you failed
to give that oracle the Enchanted Bovine Stomach-Lining (how tripe) and thus
never learned the spell that would render the bastard vulnerable to any of your
attacks.
This will never, ever, ever happen...
unless you have silver arrows. Be aware.
6) Bureaucracy is a bitch.
So, you want to save the princess, do you? You’re interested
in undoing the nefarious schemes of a shady underground organization that has
secretly infected the population with a zombie-virus? What’s that – you just
want to open up this secret passageway? Well, my friend, it’s not that simple.
Each of these little goals is going to require something of you, and it
involves two things: a) a lot of time; and b) a lot of button-pressing. See, the thing about games is
that they don’t happen in real life, and in lieu of being able to, you know,
just do something, you instead have to become an expert at navigating the
item-management and player-control system that is almost invariably far more
complicated than it needs to be because they rushed the thing to market waaaaay
before the testing was done, and now you get to figure out what they should’ve
cut or streamlined amidst your 47th hour scrolling through items and
commands to find the particular weapon or object that you need at this
particular moment, but can’t remember which of the 18 screens you last saw it
on.
This is the bureaucracy of gaming, and while it doesn’t consist nearly as
much of filing forms at desks with frizzy-haired, bespectacled women named
“Pam” as it does in real life, it’s still a pretty good workout for your
patience and frustration-quotient.
Your company's HR procedures. God dammit, Pam.
The next time you’re in the HR department, or at the DMV, or
in your University’s Records and Evaluations office, stop for a minute, and
just imagine that instead of physically picking up one of the forms, you’re
pressing “select.” Now, for each of the lines, imagine you’re pressing a button
on the d-pad, and choosing menu options to fill it out. Suddenly, it all
becomes eerily familiar. You wander to one of the lines, and initiate dialogue:
“Is this where I stand for vehicle registration?” “I’m sorry, the princess is
in another castle.” “Can I renew my benefits with this form?” “You don’t have
enough magic points.” Just earning entrance into some rooms can take seemingly
endless amounts of selecting, combining, and utilizing various elements of your
inventory, and it’s all very good practice for when you have to try and take
out a portion of your 401K in order to put a down-payment on your first house
(press “X” to increase value enough to avoid PMI).
Granted, it would probably look something like this.
7) Know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when
to walk away.
Okay, okay – this might technically belong in “10 Reasons
that Kenny Rogers can prepare you for life” – but everyone knows there aren’t 10 reasons for that, unless you happen to share a
life-goal of franchising a fried-chicken enterprise or becoming a poker
hustler, and in that case you probably don’t play video games anyways because
they cut into your valuable whittling time. So I’m appropriating it wholesale
and applying it to the situation we’re all familiar with: the eighty-seventh
respawn before a harrowing battle with an enemy that is almost definitely going
to kill you an eighty-eighth time. Your hands are aching from what you reckon
is early-onset arthritis, your face is permanently set in the sour-milk glower,
and you’re moments away from severely wounding either your television screen or
your sleeping cat, depending on how drastically your enraged state alters your
aim with the controller. You’re going full-McEnroe. Before you spew another
string of epithets that would make Louis C.K. blush, however, there’s one
strategy you probably won’t find in a walkthrough, wiki, or forum: take a deep
breath and walk away.
There... isn't that better?
Unless you were playing "Quiet Waterfall Attack," in which case, sorry.
As difficult as it is, and despite how similar your need to
win is to Ewan McGregor’s cries for just “one more hit” in Trainspotting (“I’m
sorry your baby died, but I had a deathclaw to kill, dammit”), you need to
summon the courage to just stand up, hit pause, and storm off for a while.
Surprisingly, the more you do this, the more often you’ll not only find that
you can come back to find a new strategy you didn’t think of, but how often
you’ll find walking away to help you in real life. Fights with your girlfriend
will become oddly similar to getting the next-to-last star in Super Mario
Galaxy as you realize that the vituperate outpouring of your spleen isn’t
actually helping anything. Arguing against the totalitarian regime of your
parents’ firm veto on your Limp Bizkit arm tattoo will probably seem much
clearer after a brief change in atmosphere, or some light-hearted
goomba-stomping on an earlier level (by the way, they’re totally right on that
one). Video games are a great opportunity to explore the complex negotiation
between our emotional impulses and our logical brain, and anyone who’s ever
both played Battletoads and been married for any length of time will know how
crucial it is to be able to take a little break from a heated situation and
distract yourself with YouTube tutorials or softcore porn (though which one
applies to which situation will vary among readers).
After an hour of trying to beat this level, you are fully
prepared to have that talk with your wife about never having children.
8) Travel-planning can save your life.
Maps, as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs will remind us, do not love you
like I love you. Or, to put it in terms that actually mean something that makes
sense, maps are lying rapscallions who try to lure you into a false sense of
linear simplicity that will either get you lost, killed, or both. This truth is
manifest throughout all of gaming history, be it the fold-out sheets from
Nintendo Power that you rely on to work your way through Zebes, or the in-game
world-maps in Fallout that blithely point your character toward the next
destination as the crow flies, flagrantly disregarding the poignant fact that
it either goes right through an impassable mountain range or through an
uncharted den of basketball-sized angry wasps who will unceremoniously rape
your face to death as you fire wildly into the blue skies of the Mojave
Wasteland. The gaming world has no Triple A triptiks to safely guide you on
your way to the next save-point.
Pictured here: Fallout 3 Game Map.
Not Pictured: Pretty much everything you have to watch out for.
The real-world connection here is really quite obvious, but
it perhaps better illustrated by a brief anecdote that exposes what can happen
when you don’t follow the lessons
learned from a lifetime of gaming. Although I am one of those fastidious gamers
who save ridiculously often, and sometimes even consult walkthroughs before
entering areas that I suspect might be fraught with sudden death, I failed to
enact this principle of foresight before entering Birmingham some time after
two in the morning while on a cross-country trip. Sure, I had a GPS, a cell
phone, a road atlas, and the ability to easily confirm which of the several
motor-lodges in the area would be most wise to pull into with three-weeks of
provisions stuffed haphazardly into a rented minivan, but I allowed the fatigue
of travel to set in, and just figured that “American USA Econo-Motel” (and if
that wasn’t the actual name of the place, it was darn close) offering a
suspiciously low rate of $15.99 per night was a financially sound decision.
At least this place gives you due warning.
However, after retrieving the key (not a key-card, mind you – an actual,
cut-from-metal-and-broken-dreams key you could put on a ring) from the
beshadowed man behind the bulletproof glass, I found myself walking past two
people trying to break into a twenty-year-old station wagon three stalls down
from the murder-room that I was slotted to spend what would likely be my last
night in. One of them was carrying her purse, and the other had a set of keys
in one hand and a wire hanger in the other – apparently, they wanted to dispel
any possible charity I was willing to extend to them by assuming that they were
trying to retrieve items in their
car that they had locked their
keys in. After entering the room (I was that tired), I glanced around at the
scratched mirror above a sink, two stools, and a broken end-table that
surrounded a bed with more visible stains than a set from the Annabele Chong
bukkake challenge (remember her?) and discovered that not only did this place
probably not have a rating in AAA, but it lacked a bathroom. Not just a door to
a bathroom, but an entire bathroom. I was in an Atlanta crack-whore waystation
made of nightmare-fuel, and it was all because I hadn’t thought to plan ahead
and just check my alternatives on the
map screen (read: GPS). Fortunately, I was able to get my twenty dollars
back (the advertised rate was only during daytime hours, I was told), and
within a few miles found myself at a Holiday-Inn Express (which, while not a
lot better, at least had a toilet that you didn’t have to leave your room and
get stabbed walking to) – but it could’ve turned out far, far worse. Lesson
learned: follow your gaming instincts while traveling.
Note the single light-fixture and faux-wood paneling.
And the countenance of imminent, horrific danger.
9) Time is the most precious commodity of all.
It used to be that we gamers were actually a little
embarrassed at the amount of hours we spent in our virtual escapist fantasies,
slaying dragons and exploring strange new planets and kingdoms. No one
advertised that it would take you three weeks to finally rescue princess Zelda,
or that you’d be playing Super Mario 64 for four years of your life trying to
earn every last one of those cursed glowing stars (spoiler-alert: the payoff is
definitely not worth it. This is all you get.). However, over the past decade or so, it
has become something of a point of pride for a game to promise 80, 100, or even
150 hours of adventure (even if over half of them are spent slogging your way
through swampfuls of boring slime-creatures or running various errands for
selfish and lazy NPCs), and now most games post the amount of hours you’ve been
playing on the save-file you create before you go out for one more caffeine and
junk-food run only to return and earn another couch-rash, as if to taunt you
for being the fantasy-addict that you really are.
This image was not hard to find. Credit: Rick LaFleur and the methamphetamines Bethesda doesn't want you to know they've hidden in the plastic on the game disc.
Trying to complete a quest on
any contemporary adventure game is like following a fractal line through the
Mandelbrot Set: you think you’re about there, but suddenly you find that the
pearl is only good for trading to the man with the ferret, who needs a new
glass eye, and who gives you a rusty trombone (the item, not the weird sex act
– unless it’s a Rockstar game), which you then use to bribe the drunken troll
to get into the glen where you dig for the bones of the witch, which you then
use to pick the lock to the trunk in the attic, which only contains the real map you have to follow to the treasure you thought
was so close you could spit on it. It’s as if Rube Goldberg is the hidden
designer of gaming for the past two decades, and you recognize the moment you
start deciding what hairstyle your avatar is going to wear that this is gonna
be your gig for a while.
...And this isn't even a very complicated game.
Of course, this is true about life in general, isn’t it?
Pick a hobby, and there’s bound to be not only a litany of traditions and
history about it, but a whole community devoted to its practice and perfection
over however many years it’s been done, be it biking, weaving, bowling, or, well,
playing video games. There’s no such thing as a simple task, and even going out
to get milk will often involve detours and side-quests when you discover that
you forgot to get money, or don’t have gas, or that your girlfriend asked to
you go pick her up from the doctor’s office like forty minutes ago (press X not
to break up with her – wait, that probably won’t work, you neglectful sap).
Being an adult gamer means knowing when you have time to play them, and
managing that time efficiently to avoid losing jobs, relationships, and pets.
The most valuable lesson that video games teach us is that our time is
precious, and we have to appreciate what little of it we have to actually do
what we want to do. Unless playing video games is your job, in which case… could you hook a brother up?
Cliff Bleszinski: Proof that playing games can actually make you cooler.
10) Even if it seems like a long, impossible task, it can be
done.
The missions with which gamers are presented are
intentionally created to seem like insurmountable hurdles that no normal person
could even begin to hope to accomplish. We aim to topple overlords, rescue
hostages, master the forces of nature, and even build perfect towers out of
falling foursomes of little bricks (oh no, Tetris, I haven’t forgotten about
you). And, of course, it’s true – no normal person could ever do these things – but we are not normal
people: we are gamers. We know that the mission, despite its name, is not
actually impossible. It may be really fricking hard, and it may even cause us
great distress and the pulling of hair from our pates – but it can be
completed, and there’s probably a leaderboard full of other schmoes who’ve done
it way better than we can do it – as well as a few who we can better (by the
way, whoever all those people are who are lying about their ages on the
leaderboards and making it look like I can only do better than six-year-olds…
stoppit). Yes, the ultimate truth about the gaming universe is that it is made
for being triumphed over, and success is the inevitable outcome of hard work
and a serious-minded investment of time.
Yup. That's pretty much what gamers feel like. Thanks, Conrad.
The Greek Philosopher Aristotle developed the theory of
teleology, whereupon by setting small and reachable goals, one can achieve what
seems like an impossibility over a long enough period of time. Of course, his
student Alexander took that message and killed a lot of people before bringing
home slews of foreign slaves to do the really hard work, and the empire
eventually wound up going bust from a severe imbalance of the ratio of people
who were having orgies and being hand-fed grapes to that of those who were
digging aqueducts (and feeding rich, fat bastards fistfuls of grapes), but the
message is nonetheless… well, actually – that kind of sounds familiar.
To be fair, that top graph is also accurate for Tamriel,
and they don't have socialized healthcare either.
Okay, I
admit it: the tired old Horatio Algiers story that the metanarrative of gaming
propagates may not accurately reflect the reality of life in America (or any
country in which games are being played). In fact, it’s entirely possible –
probable, even – that a poor child will work their entire life in relative
obscurity and barely eke out enough sustenance to die in that same relative
obscurity, a handful of friends and family to mourn him or her. Life is not a
game, and that’s probably one of the driving forces for our playing games in
the first place. However, that being said, whatever success we do find in life
will inevitably come from working really hard at something with little payoff
for a really long time in order to achieve a reward that most people will still
call meaningless. And that, my friend, is exactly what gaming teaches us.
Gamers don’t play video games to get on the news, amass fortunes, reap a
thronging mass of fans, or even to find friends – they do it because it’s
intrinsically rewarding, and it’s fun. Much like the rest of life, doing
something that you enjoy is its own reward, and you really can’t make much more
of it than that. If you try to make too much of it, you run the risk of
over-generalizing, and then you just wind up desperately wringing some pithy
life-lesson from your years of hobbyist gaming prowess, and… aw, nuts. Forget
it. I’m going to go try and kill some deathclaws; watch my baby.
That'll be $8.00/hr... plus, you know, your life.
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