Gaming’s ability to encourage a productive lifestyle and motivate individuals to become the best version of themselves
The digital takeover that gaming has seen lately has been chimed into the eyes of individuals as a virtual experience that has nothing to do with reality. Instead, what’s often said to define gaming from the perception of society is an activity that takes the user further away from reality thus presenting it as a pointless hobby with no benefits. While gaming on its own is an unique and distinctive source of entertainment, its effects undeniably stretch far beyond what society tries to impose and justify. As a matter of fact, the influence of societal “norms” in this fast living day and age has become so common that it tends to get individuals, especially from the young age groups, into unhealthy and unproductive loops that are later on hard to escape from. Usually what occurs is that the concept of “I am supposed to do that” takes hold of one’s mindset. This in return leads to people undermining their own abilities, dreams and goals as it subconsciously sets a limit that one is “forbidden” to cross. As a result, many highly intellectual and ambitious groups out there tend to restrict themselves to what society tells them is right and therefore never dare to experiment and actually go after what they want with their lives.
Well, you might be surprised to learn that the reality in many cases is much more different than what society portrays it as. There are never going to be 100% right things to do as everyone’s judgement of right and wrong is subjective. The matter of fact in this case is that you should always go after what you truly want and commit yourself to it rather than getting influenced by what society thinks. If gaming is something you have a passion for, if it is a hobby that makes you feel fulfilled and happy with who you are and where you want to be then you should absolutely go after it. That’s when you’ll definitely realize that “the devil is not as black as he is painted”. Science has already proven in numerous research inquiries that whenever an individual engages in an activity that makes them feel proud and confident with who they are, their self-esteem takes a rise. Moreover, the impact this has is that it inspires the given person to be more creative and try harder to accomplish his goals.
The story doesn’t end here, some other benefits that have been linked to gaming are the ability to overcome dyslexia, improvements in vision, better cognition, reduced stress, active lifestyle and much more. You can click this link to explore the full list: https://mentalfloss.com/article/65008/15-surprising-benefits-playing-video-games
Bearing in mind all of these factors, the way Orionix enters the frame is that it sets a priority to the principle of getting out of and expanding your comfort zone. Trust us when we say this.. we could have easily played it safe and decided to work at a 9am to 5pm average job right now. However, that isn’t what our mission is based on. It isn’t the purpose we have allocated to ourselves. Instead we’ve decided to be audacious, get ourselves out there and take action towards accomplishing the goals we want with this project while, most importantly, keeping an extra focus on our customer base. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’ll remain. We encourage all of you to take a similar approach with any area of your lives that you would like to change.
Yeah, gaming can have positive effects on people's lives and it can have negative effects or have very little effect either way and simply just be a leisure activity that doesn't reach the point of having much effect at all. People treat it like it's black and white but it's not.
The idea of things having to be productive and things being pointless hobbies that you reference to me never made sense. Productivity is good but you're not supposed to be trying to be productive all the time. Leisure time should be spent doing what you want to do. All of us need leisure time and not to always be trying to be productive (we should be productive if we want to be, but not do it because we "should"). For some of us, we need it a lot and we need it in order to be productive. If I don't have time to engage with my special interests (some of which are productive and some of which are not) I become less productive and start to get depressed. I've seen that pattern multiple times. It also helps me cope if I'm struggling with other things.
For gaming specifically, there's nothing wrong with gaming as a hobby.
Certain criticisms of gaming are justified but most of it isn't and is based on not understanding it (nor understanding how we got here - ie the similarity between video gaming and other gaming or even sports). Individual games sometimes cop it because people don't understand it or see one thing from it and think that's the whole game too but that's a different issue again.
It's even more active than video gaming used to be. I've got a Wii I basically only use for Wii Fit Plus but we also got a second hand Oculus recently and I've been enjoying using it for exer-gaming. Gorn's a lot of fun.
As for transferrable skills, the transferrable skills from gaming are actually quite vast, including stuff like decision making skills as was mentioned in the article you linked.
It goes beyond people even though. AI's that were trained to play Dota2 have now trained a robotic hand to handle objects. This is fascinating as I thought teaching them to play games was for us to learn from the programs we wrote in order to apply that to other things or to actually be AI's in video games (depending on the situation) because most AI's I had seen tended to get great at one thing so I thought they really only are suited to do one thing, but these AI's transferred their knowledge from the game to a new task, which is pretty impressive really. I thought I'd share that because that's impressive and also just very interesting.
I feel this also supports the idea of leisure activities and hobbies developing transferable skills because ofc a person can develop transferable skills from a game if an AI can. AI's are different to us, and can be better than us in some areas when trained well, but we are typically better at transferring skills from one situation to another, so if an AI can, ofc we're doing it.