Get Good

FPS. RPG. JRPG. Point-and-click. To the uninitiated, it might seem as though I was speaking an entirely in code. But to gamers, the words are as comprehendible as “Hop on Pop”. The idea that such a thing as ‘video game literacy’ might seem bizarre, but a heightened video game literacy can make one a more critical thinker, and instill valuable lessons in a longtime gamer.

I’ve always had a life-long love of video games. I can’t really say where it started, except that growing up I was surrounded by the advertisements for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance and the Advanced SP, the Playstation 2, the Xbox, and all the games those systems supported. I had older brothers and cousins who let me sit beside them as they plowed through zombie hoards and a younger brother whose GameInformer magazines I would smuggle into my room, flipping through reviews and developer interviewers. My very first video game was Yoshi’s Island, and after that the floodgates opened: Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Pokemon, the Legend of Zelda all permeated my youth. My game choices at the time were largely dictated by what my friends were playing, and the games themselves weren’t particularly challenging. They were fairly straightforward games with simply plotlines, rated ‘E’ for ‘everyone’. 

I enjoyed the carefree games of my childhood, but my tastes naturally changed over time. By high school I was seeking new challenges, with newer, darker games such as Skyrim, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Red Dead Redemption, Team Fortress 2 and Bioshock. I began to pay attention to strategy (what was the best class to play?) and to storylines (what would happen if I sided with the Imperials over the Stormcloaks?), and to little details I had never bothered with before (what did it mean if my Pokemon had a Gentle nature?). It was no longer a matter of just playing games. Now I could take part in discussions of video games. Oftentimes my literacy increased through defeat: When my team lost a round of Mann vs. Machine or my entire Pokemon team was defeated, I found myself looking more critically at what I was doing. I asked myself how I could be better, and what my opponents had that I did not. I read. I studied. I practiced. Gradually, I improved.

Unfortunately, my increased video game literacy came at a literal price. Video games are expensive. The sort of expensive that meant new games wound in your hot little hands only around Christmas and your birthday. The sort of expensive that meant that a five-year-old game could still go for thirty dollars at the store, which is thirty more dollars than your average high school student had. That is where Let’s Plays come in. 

The concept of a Let’s Play is fairly simple: someone records themselves playing a game from start to finish. Some do it in silence. Others do it with commentary to help with tricks and hints. The large majority of Let’s Players, however, use their play-through to provide humorous commentary about the game or its mechanics.

My fascination with Let’s Plays took off with the Super Best Friends. The quartet of Matt, Pat, Woolie, and Liam captured my attention instantly: they were four average guys who provided hilarious commentary with in-depth insights into the care and detail that go into making good games. From their videos I moved on to their podcast, where the four discussed weekly video game news, shared anecdotes, and participated in heated debates. In fact, the first podcast of theirs I listened to featured an intense debate about censorship and violence in video games. Thanks in part to the Best Friends and their weekly news, my video game literacy has elevated from comprehension to critical analysis: issues like ethics in video games, corruption in the industry, and even some of the behind-the-scenes of making games are now something I pay attention to. I find myself analyzing new releases and upcoming titles, and being a more reserved judge with how I chose to spend my money.

Admittedly, the idea of ‘video game literacy’ doesn’t seem very impressive at first glance. Video games, after all, have a tendency to be stereotyped as mindless action and violence. But a surprising amount can be gained from playing video games. For one thing, persistence and patience pays. You may die the first hundred times you fight a boss, but that one hundred and one might be the time you get the upper hand. Attention to detail is another, since many games are loaded up with items and information that might not become useful until much later on. A third detail is accepting responsibility for your actions, something that comes up a lot in role-playing and text-adventure games, where a player’s choices have irreversible consequences on what happens in the game. Video games also teach the values of both independence and cooperation. Some games can only be completed by yourself, and so you must do the research on the game alone. Others you complete only through cooperative efforts, working as a team to accomplish a goal. Learning to work with different personality types and different strategies is a vital part of cooperative games.

 Patience, diligence, responsibility, cooperation. These lessons will help me in the classroom: there will be days when I will want to lose my temper, so I must remember patience. There will be days when I feel like I’m not making any headway with the content, so I have to be persistent. There will be days when I have to take responsibility as the teacher in the classroom, and I will have to work with my peers to accomplish a goal. It takes both time and dedication to be a gamer and to be a teacher, and becoming a professional at either takes even more time and patience. There is no miracle shortcut for becoming a teacher or a gamer. As some of my fellow gamers might say, you just have to “get good”.