Life lessons through gaming #1

Moderation.

Situational awareness.

Good communication.

Teamwork.

Sharing.

Priority switching.

Board Games, video games, esports, mobile games. All of these make up gaming and esports. All of these also provide paths to learning the life lessons mentioned above, which most of us would agree are important for having a successful life. 

But how?

I’m going to walk you through a few examples (not all, I want to keep this article short) of how I’ve began teaching my children these life lessons using gaming as examples.

Remember, you are in a relationship with your kids, there is give and take, compromise, fun, hard, sucky, and amazing times. Your job as a parent is guide your child on their path of becoming their own person, not force them into a path that isn’t theirs.

Situational Awareness (SA):

Situational awareness; this is such an important part of life, it keeps us safe, it allows us to know how we fit into a situation, or otherwise referred to as our surroundings. It could even help us save someone’s life one day, think of the early PokémonGo days with billboard of “don’t walk across a freeway!”

This skill can be learned at an early age through gaming and then honed throughout the rest of that individuals life. Whether it’s MineCraft or Fortnite, knowing what’s happening around your character is vitally important to the success of that match, or build, or quest, etc. Mining for Diamond, digging to the bottom of the server to find nothing, only to climb your way back up and see Diamond in a tunnel only 6 blocks away from your original path that you didn’t notice. Or running from the storm and not hearing or seeing that other player just a few meters away means you get sent back to the lobby before them taking 11th place, almost to the top 10!

Watching and guiding and pointing out things to your child during or after their game will help them develop the importance of situational awareness. I’m a former Marine, situational awareness was literally a life saving skill that was required! Without it, we would not be the best at everything we did. Knowing the importance of this skill I’ve made it part of my parenting plan, “teach my kids how important it is to have!”

Needless to say, situational awareness discussions happen at least once a month in my house, whether it be about gaming or picking up dirty socks that have been in the hall way for 3 days.

I started out by having general chats with my kids about it when they were 6ish, teaching them the meaning of the words and why I think it’s important. Over time I’ve realized that pointing out prime examples like “look both ways” or “use your peripheral vision so you don’t trip” only got me so far. I mean, we aren’t tripping every time we walk (even with my eyes closed), and yes the danger of vehicles is there but how often are you crossing super busy streets? 

I started to adapt my approach to use examples they cared about. Gaming!

With my son, it’s been more difficult than my daughter (she loves volleyball, so that is the mechanism we use to teach her SA) to show the importance of SA, until I learned how to speak his language.

“You missed that health kit. It’s to the right slightly, a little more in your peripheral vision buddy.”

“There was a team on the left behind that box, I saw them move behind as you were looting the ground items.”

The more I leaned into those conversations and asked what he saw and didn’t see, the more I improved my teaching method and the faster he picked it up. This only became reality because I stepped back from my original approach and evaluated what was important to him and how he processed data. We as humans instinctively care a whole lot more about the things that are directly important to us as opposed to things that don’t pertain directly to our every day lives. You as the parent can’t force your way as the only way to learn life lessons. Your child’s world is vastly different than yours as a child, and they are learning this new world faster than you are. You have to step back and look at the whole picture and grand scheme of things before trying to force your way on your child. You grew up with tv commercials and news papers, they are growing up with the whole freaking world in their face! Don’t be afraid to make adjustments.

Give it a try, start small and slow. Remember you didn’t learn everything overnight, be patient and stay the course. I’ll cover more topics like moderation and communication in future articles.