What if Games impacted real-life decisions?
Games play an important part of our lives. When we are young they teach us how to follow instructions. How to cooperate with others. Hopefully how to accept defeat as well as victory. Games get us to improve our bodies as well as our minds. There are many examples of positive gameplay and how games influence us. And for all you skeptics out there, that includes video games. If you doubt me, check out the TED Talk by Daphne Bavelier on your brain on video games:
https://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games
Games clearly have a benefit for us all. As with anything though, they can be played to excess and have negative influences as well. There is plenty of research on that too.
But let’s step away from the discussion of playing games and their present impact on our well-being and let’s jump into the realm of What ifs…? What if games we played impacted our real-life decisions?
In Fiction, I’m reminded of the movie, “The Last Starfighter” (1984) where a teenager who excels at playing a particular video game, discovers that this game was actually produced to screen candidates as fighters in a galactic war. He gets recruited and… well… go watch the movie. I thought it was good.
In the book Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, a boy is being trained on computer battle simulations, to command a battle fleet fighting an enemy that once attacked Earth. (Or so he thought).
These fictional characters were making real life decisions as part of their gameplay.
In real life, organizations like NASA, the Armed Forces, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), to name a few, use simulation games to train people to do their jobs. Their game decisions don’t impact what they do at the moment of play, but do impact the experiences they have for when the real decisions need to be made.
All this is well and good but it’s time to get a little different. Let’s look at some of the games we play now or played as a kid, and see what decisions we have made in our adult life are possibly based on them. I’ll do this in the form of questions. Think back to how you played and what you do now.
Did Monopoly impact how you choose to purchase things? Did you strive to purchase as many things as you could? Did you buy a lot of cheap things, or wait to buy expensive items, knowing that you’d make more money in the long run. Out of curiosity, how did all our present billionaires fare in Monopoly as kids?
How about our great war heroes? How did playing games like Risk and Stratego impact how they deploy their troops and where they chose to attack or defend? How did they secure their own flag or country? Or use spies?
And the Game of Life? Did it influence your path? What career you chose? Go to college? How many kids you had? Did you become that millionaire?
Think of other games we played, not only board games. Hop Scotch? Tag? Hide and Seek? Jump rope? Kick the Can? Cops and Robbers? Hounds and Hares?
What would be the real life decisions we gleaned from those activities?
In reality, I don’t think playing those games had any influence on our lives in terms of life choices. But how close to our games is our reality?
For now, I want you to picture yourself as if they did influence you. Which game(s) would have been the most influential in your life and where would it have taken you?
Or What if it were the other way around and the world we are living in is just somebody else’s game?
This is a fascinating question, because I loved to play board games as a child. Stratego, Sorry, Monopoly, Parcheesi. Then, with my son: Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land (I found Candy Land so relaxing!), Trouble, The Game of Life and, again, Monopoly. I never thought it may have been socializing to play these games until the time my husband (who has an autistic younger brother) played a board game with a autistic teenager. She was having trouble with the concepts of fair play and the mother was openly allowing her to cheat – I speculate, to avoid a meltdown, but I never did find out why. I’ll never know why because we lost track of the family and never repeated the experience.
Those were great games. I’d forgotten all about Stratego.
I think game play does impact our choices because it teaches us how to evaluate the choices. This does not mean that if we tried to buy all the properties in Monopoly we will try to buy everything now but it does mean we have one more tool to evaluate risk and return. Interesting note, one of my daughters played Monopoly in a grade 12 calculus class. After every unit test the next class they relaxed over a friendly game. During that time based on the stories she told, the class was still learning, just in a different way.
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