Learning from games

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

You ever learn from games, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly? I've found that games generally aren't very educational in and of themselves but they're extremely effective springboards for finding new interests.

This is something that's been on my mind (I had a long ramblepost drawn up but deleted it). I've been thinking about getting back into reading again, but tying reading into my gayming to get the synergy that comes from overlapping interests. (I used to like to cook cultural dinners related to books I read, but I can't afford that anymore.) I started playing Madden to cultivate an appreciation for football, and that's worked okay, thought I'd learn that, and also learn more about military campaigning and read this entry-level (non-engineer) book on rocketry for Kerbal.

 

[Maskull]

I wish there was a serious cooking simulation game. Sure, there’s Cooking Simulator, but that’s streamer bait that is worthless as an educational tool. I feel like there is a real market heretofore untapped.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

I wish there was a serious cooking simulation game. Sure, there’s Cooking Simulator, but that’s streamer bait that is worthless as an educational tool. I feel like there is a real market heretofore untapped.

There is a game called My Summer Car which lets you build a car from its constituent parts and race it.

And when I say "build a car," I mean it in the most boring way possible. You have to tighten individual screws, nuts, and bolts. and you have to use the right-sized tool for the job (picked a wrench that's one size too big? Sorry, fucko, get the right wrench!) When something breaks (and it will break), you have to pop the hood and examine the engine to find what's wrong (timing belt snapped, crankshaft broken, etc.) This can be incredibly inconvenient when you're in the racing portion of the game.

The reason such a genre is untapped is because, like real life, it is boring and frustrating.

Spoiler: Videos

 

[CuzinEd]

Thanks to GTA 3 and VC I learned military time or 24 hour clock.

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

I played Life & Death 2: The Brain as a kid and I've considered myself qualified to operate on any subdural haemotoma I might happen to come across ever since

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Roller Coaster Tycoon taught me you can pursue a career at amusement parks and still cause deaths like the fat Sambo guy who fell off the ride and died.

 

[TheRetardKing]

I used to play with these a long time ago.

 

[Lammy]

I have one very strong example of this I learned a bit over a decade ago from a video game:

In the epilogue of Metroid Fusion, Samus mentions how her actions during the game of destroying the BSL scientific research space station in defiance of the the Galactic Space Federation (the single unified government of humanity) to protect the universe from the X parasite (that was intentionally being allowed to live and proliferate on the BSL for insane 'research' purposes) would not likely be understood by the people of humanity and she would likely be vilified in legal courts for what she did, but is reassured by her AI computer assistant with the words of "Do not worry. One of them will understand. One of them must." in regard to her actions, which led to her realizing that "We are all bound by our experiences. They are the limits of our consciousness."
Those two exact sentences have always helped me understand the limitations of perspective, that people can only truly understand the actions of others when they have similar experiences to what led another to do some such action.
There are two exact specific scenarios that it helped me understand; that you should forgive people that are doing something wrong but ignorant of that they are doing something wrong (but try to help direct them towards doing things right); and that some people that do things that seem horrible at first glance (ex. killdozer, kaczynski) have very understandable cause when you look at the full reasons of why they did what they did.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Vidya helped me learn english as a kid, is not my first language but games were never sold translated in my region. Most kids would get stuck in a game because they didn't pick up on the NPC hints unless you put the extra effort.

I also liked googling the historical and mythological references from all the random names in jrpgs and learning where it all came from, sometimes that can send you into a rabbit hole.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

The Elder Scrolls games have taught me more new words than any other series. Thaumaturgy? Look me in the eye and tell me you knew what it meant without looking it up.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I learned water conducts electricity, thanks Pokemon, I guess.

 

[byuu]

All my best pick-up lines I learned from video games

 

[Spud]

What I learnt from video games is that bigger is better and that I like women

 

[VargReallyDidNothingWrong]

I've absolutely learned or at the very least reinforced a lot of communication skills, and things of that nature, in team-focused games, especially relatively complicated ones like ARMA. Learning grid coordinates, learning proper radio etiquette, learning how to deliver the most relevant information without shitting up the line, all very useful and not just for wargamers larping as soldiers. Decision making, planning, information gathering, etc.

Even games like Tarkov can teach you a lot about small unit tactics if you're interested in learning (despite games and specifically PVP games on the whole being more about learning to game the systems and following the "meta").

 

[OneMillionRPM]

That DJ minigame on the Gameboy Camera taught me bare-bones music theory. Too bad you were limited to a single 16-note bar, thing could've inspired a lot of musicians if it let you make full songs.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

Whatever happened to kids edutainment games anyway? I remember playing the shit out of the old jumpstart games back in the day.

Are there modern versions of these games?

 

[The Ugly One]

Thanks to Panzer General and the games inspired by it, I learned

1. Never chase infantry into forests with tanks
2. Never drop your paratroopers behind enemy lines if you're not going to be able to get armor & artillery in to support them within the day
3. Artillery is the king of battle
4. Gaining air supremacy is hard, but if you can do it, you faceroll the enemy
5. Tanks and planes are really cool, but at the end of the day, it's the infantry who's responsible for capturing and holding key strategic points.

 

[rel=alternate]

Is this limited to video games?

You can learn a lot from games. If you look at things like chess, poker, or even board games, diving into the strategy will inevitably make you learn useful things. Maybe just for this game though, but it's a thought process that can prove useful in daily life.

If anything, you will learn about stats, pattern recognition, and game theory.

 

[Night Owl]

Learning English was a big one. Especially because the only games I used to play as a kid were point-and-click adventure games, which were all very dialogue and story heavy. Stuff like Jane Jensen's work on the Gabriel Knight games really got me interested in history as well. Maybe I was a really dumb kid, but the concept of putting real life historical things into a fictional story kind of blew my mind at the time.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

There is a game called My Summer Car which lets you build a car from its constituent parts and race it.

And when I say "build a car," I mean it in the most boring way possible. You have to tighten individual screws, nuts, and bolts. and you have to use the right-sized tool for the job (picked a wrench that's one size too big? Sorry, fucko, get the right wrench!) When something breaks (and it will break), you have to pop the hood and examine the engine to find what's wrong (timing belt snapped, crankshaft broken, etc.) This can be incredibly inconvenient when you're in the racing portion of the game.

The reason such a genre is untapped is because, like real life, it is boring and frustrating.

Spoiler: Videos

People mistakenly think that is a car building simulator when it's actually an extremely accurate 80s/90s northern summer simulator.

Learning English was a big one. Especially because the only games I used to play as a kid were point-and-click adventure games, which were all very dialogue and story heavy. Stuff like Jane Jensen's work on the Gabriel Knight games really got me interested in history as well. Maybe I was a really dumb kid, but the concept of putting real life historical things into a fictional story kind of blew my mind at the time.

Playing Sierra's text parser adventures with nothing but very limited self-taught english was both fun and informative. Especially Larry, there might be boobs in that one! The age verification taught me... probably something.