From the first moment they were introduced to me, I’ve been obsessed with video games. But for a long time I didn’t understand exactly why, and this caused a lot of problems with the people around me.

So, I started studying my obsession with video games. I discovered two common traits, progression and feedback, which best explain why I like them so much.

Progression

Like most humans aged 5-18, I spent most of my time at school. I genuinely liked learning, so I often had a lot of space at school to do other things while still getting decent grades. A decent amount of this time was spent playing games. Unlike how I felt in class, video games offered engagement that matched my abilities. As soon as I was ready to increase the difficulty, I could. I no longer had to wait for the class to catch up if I wanted to move on. The most addicting part of the game for me, was seeing my potential to do harder and harder challenges. I loved going from the feeling of seeing it for the first time and getting slaughtered, because I was sure if I worked hard enough eventually it would feel easy.

As I started spending more and more time progressing in video games, I found the world of online competitive gaming. I quickly realized the local competition only scratched the surface of what was actually possible. In order to get better I had to adopt a growth mindset. Be ok with how little I actually knew, and work hard on learning more. Watch the people who are the best at what I want to do. Take notes. Watch what I do. Take notes. Implement the notes little by little. It can’t be done overnight.

This is where I started realizing getting better at anything is all about intentional practice and thorough review of past performances. Having better defined it, this concept immediately applied to other areas of my life. Want to get better at music? Study pros; record myself and review; drill weak mechanics. Want to get better at my job? Study the best performer; keep track of what I do and review; drill weak mechanics. But at the end of the day, the confidence in this process originated from it helping me climb in online games.

Feedback

If you like learning, then you know feedback is a very important part of it.

What I like about feedback in games is that it’s real time. You immediately feel the penalties and rewards. Even though they aren’t physically comparable to real life, they can be valuable mentally.

Playing a platformer and need to clear the stage? Dying = start over; bad. Not dying = go to next stage; good. 

Rules of the game are often reinforced because if you actually look at why you died, you just prevent it the next time. To this day I spent a lot of time failing, not because I love failing, but because it gives me information on how to get better. Although I now apply this to all aspects of my life, it all started from video games.

Conclusion
If you also like video games, reflect on what you like about them. You may have also spent thousands of hours playing games, but it doesn’t mean that time was wasted. After all, everyone has things they find more interesting than other things.