i am gamer

consider this an intermission during my great epic adventure in the mountains...

Inspired by this article:

http://infovore.org/talks/if-gamers-ran-the-world/

The author kinds fails at providing details of how individual games translate into real world skills, but it's a better-paced, more readable article because of it. If you doubt any of his game skill-related claims, comment, and I'll back him up.



I'm gonna try a little experiment. I'm gonna see if I can describe a favorite success story of mine from my World of Warcraft days to a mixed audience containing very few gamers, and see if it's effective.

So, back when I played WoW for at least a few hours every day, sometimes up to 18 hours in one go, including bathroom and food breaks (eaten at the computer, of course), one of my favorite things to do was PvP in the battlegrounds. PvP stands for "player versus player" and is characterized by putting your own character's abilities and magical items to the test against another character (something you can do when squaring off against computer-controlled AI monsters, too) and also putting your own understanding of game-based tactics and strategy, your own ability to recognize opponents' dynamic behavior and innovate and improvise new tactics accordingly, in the moment. You put all this up against other players, people just like you, and see who wins.

I'll never be happy until people recognize that this activity is no different than speed chess: you're presented with a self-contained world with its own rules and limits, be it a small tabletop grid or the sprawling land of Azeroth, and it's up to the player to analyze the rules and form strategies and combinations of moves to achieve a goal, as quickly as possibly. Even if you have the best strategies imaginable, if you can't implement them rapidly, you're doomed.

Now, what I've described so far is a basic duel situation. That's one player versus one other player. A battleground in WoW is a self-contained zone where players square off in teams, of about 10 people on each team, each controlling their own personal character that they've grown accustomed to playing. Each player has customized their own button controls, hotkeys, everything, and honed their skills, grown so used to the controls that the keyboard and mouse become extensions of their fingertips, rather than foreign hardware. It's all muscle memory.

These two teams of 10 have a goal. Me, playing a druid, able to shapeshift into a superfast cheetah or a tough bear or a deadly big cat, I prefered to play in Warsong Gulch, a standard map where the teams play capture the flag. The battleground is set up like you'd play in real life: two forts, roughly identical in structure, with an open field between them. My cheetah speed gives me an advantage as a flag-runner.

A common event on this map is a standoff. One rule is that an enemy flag cannot be placed on your own flag stand and captured for a point unless your own flag is there. So if both teams possess their enemy's flag, no one can score a point until their own flag is recovered. You do this by killing the opponent holding the flag, then clicking on the flag as it falls to the ground. It then magically appears on your own flag point, and you can then capture the enemy's flag.

During standoffs, each team splits in two. One for defense, protecting the ally holding the enemy flag, and one for offense, a team of hunter/killers who have to track down and eliminate the enemy holding their own flag. I found out, after playing extensively and almost exclusively acting as the flag-runner for my team, that I was exceptionally good at hiding with the flag.

I loved hide and seek as a kid. Unlike my friends, I always knew that if you get nervous and peek outside your hiding spot to see if you're being pursued, you get caught. Be patient, stay hidden.

In WoW, you're blessed with other forms of perception. The third person perspective means you're always watching yourself in addition to the world around you. You can use this camera angle to see around corners. There are also a few abilities that let you see player locations on a map, something that only two character types can do. Hunters and druids.

I became very good at hiding with the enemy flag in areas of the map that I knew are less-trafficked. Areas that the game designers put in only to act aestetically. Wagons sitting around, crates, fences with an occasional gap in it. Corners of the map. I'd hide in there, under my fort, behind the wagon, etc. I'd watch the enemy players scouring the earth for me from my hiding spots, using the hovering camera angle to my advantage. When the coast was clear, I'd relocate to a place I'd seen them already search, and give them a chance to search where I'd just been.

I once hid for 20 minutes like this. It's a small map, understand. It takes 30 seconds to cross from one end to the other of the map. 20 minutes is a long time to hide. I could only do this by anticipating the actions of my opponents. "If I were trying to find me, what would I do?" "They're apparently using tactic A, how best do I protect myself?"

One time I got discovered, and had to bolt. Using my superior speed, I quickly got ahead of my enemy before they could attack me. I ran around a corner, so they couldn't see me anymore, and hid behind a fence. They bolted past me, thinking I'd run to the safety of the inside of my fort. Just like in the movies, where the hero cuts into an alley and the bad guys rush past, oblivious.

I'd known beforehand that the typical player's camera angle is held low, to see into the distance, rather than high, to see behind nearby corners and obstacles. I do this myself most of the time. If I'd been my pursuer, however, I'd have recognized that I was passing obstacles, and popped the camera high as I was passing, just in case my enemy was hiding rather than doing the expected action of fleeing to the fort.

What's more, I stayed behind that fence for 3 long minutes. The entire enemy team passed me, mere feet away from me, oblivious. Then I spotted a hunter approaching, and knowing he could be tracking me, I got ready to bolt. As soon as I noticed his approach deviate from the route of his blind teammates, I knew he'd spotted me and was trying to close, so again I bolted, this time actually running into the fort because my teammates told me they had a defense group ready to protect me, but they didn't know where I was.

I ran into their arms, and turned into a bear, ready to take a load of damage.

Every standoff like this in which I could hide alone and protect myself freed up resources, my teammates, to rush the enemy and kill the enemy with our flag. Then I could rush into our own fort and win a point. We'd always leave a couple people in our fort to make sure the enemy couldn't capture our flag again as soon as it appeared, of course, but my powers of observation and improvisation were an asset to my team. Even my willingness to avoid fights was an oddity, it seemed. When confronted with one opponent, I was competent enough that I could usually win. But I knew that while I was fighting, that enemy was reporting my position, calling for help. Fighting has it's own rewards, personal pride, your name appearing higher on the scoreboard at the end of the match, etc. But actually winning the match by getting 3 captured flags counted more, and benefits the whole team. My restraint was also an asset.

So that's a long story, based on that one article, trying to give gaming some mental legitimacy.

How can regular encounters like that aid me in real life? What skills am I actually using?

Team-work. To succeed, I need to be able to look at my team, assess the skills they have because of their character class, and also their competency as a player, and understand how they're likely to act in a certain situation. Rarely do battleground skirmishes have formal plans rehearsed well ahead of time. Elite, tightly knit teams do, of course, but more casual pick-up games do not. Although, there is something to be said for the cultures that develop overtime, as certain effective strategies develop and are transmitted throughout an entire game community casually, through experience and observation. Trust is a huge factor here, too.

Pattern recognition, behavior analysis. Systematizing human behavior is a huge deal in academics and business and politics. In WoW PvP, you have to be good at this. You have to be able to know the options your enemy has at any given moment, and come up with counters as fast as possible. Real time tactical decisions, based on instant observation and analysis. Then you have to go back to team-work, being able to coerce your teammates to quickly agree with your analysis and follow your requests/orders.

Practice, motivation. Anyone who says a gamer has a short attention span or lacks the willpower to study or is lazy is either not actually observing a gamer or is not actually perceiving what is going on. I mentioned I played WoW for 18 hour stretches, right? What corporate employer doesn't want to employ someone who can work that long during crunch time? The problem is that the right job, the right process, hasn't been found in which the gamer can thrive. WoW deals with a rewards-based system. Good behavior is rewarded with in-game currency, more powerful items, and more skills. These rewards are then used so the player can accomplish the same goals more easily, and have a chance at tackling more challenging goals that were completely impossible before. If an employer can set a gamer going on something the gamer is passionate about, a complex problem, in which the gamer is free to innovate new procedures to go about tackling the problem, create their own tools, the gamer thrives.

Critical thinking, as mentioned in the article I started this with, is HUGE in defeating the major obstacles in a game. Sure, you can let other people tell you how to do it, but problem-solving is a vital skill for any hardcore gamer.

I'm bored now. Gonna mention another favorite moment from WoW:

I was in another battleground called Alterac Valley. It's much larger and more complex than the capture the flag match. A huge, sprawling area that takes a good 5 minutes to cross from end to end, filled with forts and roads and gold mines, all of which can be captured, used, protected and destroyed. Again there are two opposing forts, but this time the teams are 40 against 40. One time I actually led my team to victory, noticing the front lines of the conflict were not moving, that it seemed no one had any leadership or strategy, so I convinced 6 players to follow me in a flanking maneuver and snuck behind the front lines to capture a resource, distracting the enemy enough that it fell back to the resource, breaking their front lines and allowing my team to gain ground.

That's another story, though. This story is about a chance encounter in a destroyed fort. I was running back from my fort to the front lines after dropping off some gathered resources, and I went into a fort that had been ours to see if anyone was still inside. While there, an enemy warrior rushed in and attacked me.

Quick note: typically, one-on-one duels in WoW last 30 seconds to a minute. My feral druid faught this protected warrior for 5 minutes. Stalemates aren't unheard of when two skilled players go head-to-head. If both players know how to reach to taking damage and avoid further damage long enough to heal, fights could last forever. After 5 minutes, I realized none of my typical fast-kill strategies were working. Took a bit long to notice that, I admit. So I needed to figure out how to kill this guy, how I could either start doing damage super fast, or prevent him from incapacitating me momentarily so he could bandage himself and heal. I took advantage of the 45 second pattern we'd put together. I recognized about when he would incapacitate me and bandage over the damage I'd caused, and when I would stun him so I could cast a healing spell on myself. When it got to near the moment I expected him to get ready to heal himself, I changed from the bear form I'd been using to my cat form, and used an attack that causing continual bleeding damage, preventing the use of the sort of bandages he was using. I then was able to finish him off quickly.

I recognized that my usual standard operating procedures were falling short, so I reevaluated the situation, found an opening, and altered my tactics suddenly to exploit that opening to my advantage and achieve my goal.

How is that not a valuable skill in the real world? If not in business or the military, at least in Olympic fencing.

It's up to gamers to gain these skills, hone then, and learn to apply them in the real world. It's up to non-gamers to recognize that gamers aren't lazy or unproductive, they just need the proper outlet, the proper task and procedure to work in.

Closing thought: games can teach you how to think. In Honduran schools, thinking is rare. Memorization is focused on. I wonder how the grades of gamers vs. nongamers compare in Honduran high schools, and how IQ tests would rate then rate them.

Cheers.