Gaming has become way more popular and mainstream in recent years than anyone could probably have predicted about a decade or so ago, but that doesn’t mean that it’s now seen universally as a great and wholesome pastime.
It’s still just an inescapable fact of life that gaming gets a bad rap much of the time, with stereotypical views and arguments portraying gamers as gawky, antisocial kids with questionable personal hygiene, who are incapable of exerting discipline over their lives.
Now, that statement obviously isn’t true across the board, but it’s got a grain of truth to it. As all gamers know, it is possible for a game to consume all of your waking hours, frustration notwithstanding, and to do some harm to your social life.
But could gaming actually make you a better person, if you approached it in a different way? There’s good reason to think the answer to that is “yes”, and here are a few ways you could make it true in your life.
Use gaming as a reward to help fortify good habits
The writers Charles Duhigg and James Clear have both produced pretty serious works on the topic of habit, in the form of Duhigg’s “The Power of Habit” and Clear’s “Atomic Habits”, respectively.
Both books make an important point — if you really want a habit to stick, you’ve got to “reward” the behaviour, more or less immediately, with something you find pleasurable.
Now, it’s possible that the sense of satisfaction that comes from performing the habit is its own reward. But it’s also possible — even likely — that you’ll need some outside incentive.
Gaming might be the perfect reward system here. It won’t impact your waistline like a slice of chocolate cake, or necessarily cost you a lot like a pat-on-the-back consumer purchase.
So, when you perform some big daily habit that you want to reinforce, maybe give yourself a bit of gaming time to reinforce it.
Look for principles and lessons in the games you play, that can carry over to the rest of your life
The best games are art forms, both in the complexity of their stories, and also in the engaging mechanisms that are built into them.
This means that in any given game, there are likely to be certain principles and lessons that you can take away, and that could apply to the rest of your life.
A game may, for example, remind you that you need to be tenacious when looking for solutions to problems. This could then inspire you to keep working, and to find the mobile and web solution for KYC compliance that’s been eluding you, in your side-business.
Or, maybe, a powerful narrative moment in a game will remind you of the kind of person you want to be, and will steel your resolve to act with integrity in that particular area of your life.
Game after bouts of hard work, to help yourself de-stress and regain equilibrium
Everyone’s familiar with the idea of “working hard, and playing hard”, but if you listen to to the opinions of some productivity gurus, you might actually need to “play hard”, or at least, “rest hard”, in order to be able to consistently work hard.
When you constantly work without injecting a bit of fun into your life to counterbalance it, you risk burning out. You become emotionally frayed. You may even start to lose creativity. Your job, as well as your overall quality of life, could suffer as a result.
Gaming after hard bouts of work could be a great way of averting this fate, both by serving as a reward for the work, but also by helping you to have some fun and de-stress in a big way before getting back to work again.
