Welcome back to Save State where we sometimes tilt, but also sometimes a-whirl. Everyone loves a good county fair: There are rides of dubious levels of maintenance, pleasurable junk food of all different sorts of varieties, and a fistfight that broke out over who got the last funnel cake of the day. While getting my hand bit by a horse, I had a sudden realization that Harvest Moon never prepared me for the possibility of horse bites. I mean, what’s up with that? In this edition of Save State, let’s go over 5 lessons I did learn from video games.
Lesson 1: Communication is key
Players experienced with online multiplayer games will likely already know that communication is important. Clear and concisely articulated speech is important to quickly have people grasp your situation, like how players in Halo will call out, “He’s one shot on my X” to give the location of an enemy who bested them but is at low health. Being able to convey your boundaries is important for healthy adult relationships or any relationship no matter your age.
Being able to succinctly elucidate your thoughts to other people is a key skill that practically everybody needs. This will help with just about every interaction you’ll have with other human beings. Exercising and improving your communication will help animals too. It’s important to be clear about your wants, boundaries, and vulnerabilities: Never be afraid to tell someone that they’re going too far or not far enough. Having healthy dialogue is likely how I’ve been in a loving relationship with the same girl since I was 15 years old. And everyone told me those half hour long Xenosaga cutscenes were useless!
Lesson 2: Everyone loves gifts
I used to not be very big into giving gifts. I’m a person who decidedly views time as the most important resource a person has to give: After all, once it’s used up, we’re gone. In this light, I always viewed spending time with my friends as a companion to be one of the best things I could do because what could possibly be more valuable than a person’s time? This, unfortunately, was most likely a perspective born from living in poverty as a child. And as I grew into adulthood, I began to discover that a well-timed gift can really make someone’s day.
Memories eventually fade, no matter how much time you spend with a person, but they can glance over at a stuffed animal, an artbook, or maybe some other bauble that may have been viewed as unnecessary at the time but later becomes a firm reminder of a person you loved. Even in video games, time is a very precious resource, but in titles like Story of Seasons or Rune Factory, you can get closer to the characters by providing them with items that they like and balancing the time spent acquiring potential gifts with your other activities is one of the core skills you need as you build up your farm or town.
Lesson 3: Are you really going to need that later, or are you just hoarding?
Everyone has been inside that one person’s home where they just never throw anything out. “I may need it later” or “that’s still got some use” are common phrases that get thrown around in these instances. Thankfully, even with my sentimental nature and attachment to gifts that were given by those who departed ahead of me, I have to maintain a relatively clean living space for my mental health. This could be connected to the fact that I have to wash my hands at least once every hour or two or I start getting irritable (I literally feel like I can feel germs and illness on my hands if I don’t wash them regularly, which gets really bad during winter when my skin becomes dry and cracked).
Anyway, the capacity to throw things away or just the simple ability to use things up when needed is something I find in RPGs and roguelikes too. If I have to use a consumable in a video game to pass an encounter or boss fight, I will 100% use that item, even if you only get a handful of them in an entire 40-to-50-hour adventure. Life is full of consumable resources, and there’s no point in being a real-life loot goblin: Use what you need and find it a better home if you don’t. There is always someone out there who can take good care of your lightly used goods, which is better than hoarding them in a basement!
Lesson 4: Don’t be afraid to ask someone to repeat themselves
You all know what I’m talking about. An owl swoops down to tell you a bunch of exposition and you accidentally replied yes when he asks if you wanted him to repeat all of that. The funny thing is, many people who mash buttons to get through dialogue and are forced to listen to it again are the same people who will go “uh-huh” when someone is giving us instructions, even when we’re not fully paying attention. This doubles back to the effective communication line, but it’s so important that I felt it worth giving it a point on this list too.
Normalize asking someone to repeat what they said when you didn’t hear it and to extrapolate when you didn’t understand what they were asking of you. There’s nothing worse than working on a project for hours only to discover that you made some big, glaring mistake that could have been easily avoided had you just gone, “Did you mean X?” This is probably the single largest lesson I’ve learned from any video game. While people in real life may not outright ask, “Do you want me to repeat that,” I have to take the initiative to ask them myself.
Lesson 5: Failure hurts, but you can always learn from it
It always sucks to fail. Those of us who enjoy games on a more difficult level know about failure. From the Pantheon of Hollownest to the Sword Saint to literally any part of the US release of The Adventures of Bayou Billy, many gamers know that if you hit a brick wall enough, it will eventually make a crack. Every failure gives you some kind of insight into something you could have improved upon or done differently. That, effectively, is the essence of adventure, especially for titles released before 1995.
What’s important is that your adventurous attitude and willingness to fail extends into real life too. Failure can suck when you don’t just respawn afterwards, but there are still valuable lessons to learn from it all the same. Some people are born lucky while others have to work harder than anyone else just to get by. What’s important is that you’re still able to try and take (manageable) risks to get ahead because even in real life, you’ll gain EXP from it.
That being said, I think we can bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember, if you see a child drop their corn dog near the animal stalls at the local fair, you can always tell the parents. If the parents then get mad at you for even remotely suggesting that a corn dog dropped in dirt is a waste of their money, just be happy it’s not your child that could potentially contract cholera.
Stay healthy everyone, and see you in two weeks!