Toying With the Gravel

 Video games teach life lessons.

Left 4 Dead: Teamwork
On its higher difficulties, Left 4 Dead may be the greatest team-building exercise yet conceived. In crews of four we strategized to overcome complex obstacles, assigned one another responsibilities according to our talents, communicated to adapt our tactics on the fly, and developed rules of conduct such that no one would disrupt the progress of the collective while ensuring that each of us had to pull his or her own weight. Even in the competitive mode of the game, the rapid coordination of the infected team's attacks is crucial to the efficient slaughter of an experienced, cooperating survivor band.

The Sims: Priorities
After playing The Sims for a long time, I began to imagine my life in terms of the little bars that represent each Sim's energy, fun, hunger, and so on, and how they contribute to my total mood. In The Sims, you have to take care of your basic needs and your overall happiness before you can look to fulfilling greater aspirations and life goals, which I feel is a reasonably accurate representation of reality. A Sim stops studying or practicing useful skills if they are in a bad mood, much in the way a real person can burn themself out on their work when they neglect recreation and basic health. Primary goal: live happily by whatever means necessary. Secondary goal: everything else.

BioShock: Objectivity
Anyone could predict that playing BioShock might teach a person a thing or two about the dangers of capitalism and absolute freedom. But for me, BioShock was an exposure, even if in a negative light, to such a radically different ideology that I was jarred out of the assumptions I had previously made about the nature of morality. When faced with Dr. Steinman, I found myself unable to explain why his insistence on beauty as a moral imperative was flawed without also undermining my own moral principles. Rapture, I found, was not an ideological failure but merely a practical one, in the sense that all ideology is simply irrelevant next to practical, objective reasoning.

Borderlands: Stoicism
I made a sniper character in Borderlands, but during my late-game quest for optimization I found a shotgun that irrefutably outpaced all of my other guns in terms of damage over time. I felt annoyed that I had funneled so much of the character build toward sniper rifle bonuses, only to have the game tell me that, if I wanted to be DoT optimal, I should have made a shotgunner. Much as it sucked to see my bonuses go to waste, I just accepted that the optimal strategy was not what I had hoped and the shotgun became my DoT weapon anyway. Better to make the most with whatever one is handed than to get needlessly frustrated over it.