| Tangential. Games with good stories and gameplay are the same to me as novels, if not better. In that they allow me to experience things otherwise not possible. Like running for dear life when Dhaka is chasing you in Prince of Persia; or decimating a whole village in Skyrim and having that dark big hole in your chest for what you did carry on until you load the game again. But the most recent learning from myself has been from Divinity 2 Original Sin. Great game. There you have a main avatar and 3 other players, equally qualified in every sense, and you control all 4. The only difference between the avatar and the rest is one's identity tied to the avatar. At some point I realized my ranger and melee are pretty strong while wearing nothing but tattered loin clothes; while my avatar, a jack of everything cool and carrier of all the gear he could not even wear sucked. This was an epiphany for me in team spirit. I was hoarding everything cool for my avatar. This had 2 effects. Firstly, it starved the rest of the team from getting good, relevant gear. Secondly, the rest remained laser focused on a couple of skill trees while my avatar, or "I", was hoarding all the cool skills wanting to become a god of all the things or something. So I gave away some epic gear to my ranger and melee units and they got buffed a lot. And I also trimmed the avatar into a single well defined role (pyro summoner) and now I have a pretty strong team. I am pretty sure this pattern would have had a longer lasting effect on my personal and professional development as well, had I not felt it on my skin like that. Everyone knows you're supposed to share or not to be greedy but I wonder for how many that has been a matter of "life and death". |
Games keep tending to be dismissed as mere entertainment, but there is a lot of value to be had by seriously thinking about them because they are toy models.