Joe Tharakan | League of lazy gamers

Cup O' Joe | How video games have tons of positive benefits we tend to overlook

By Joe Tharakan 04/11/16 10:27pm

I am a huge fan of League of Legends. For anyone not familiar, this game — abbreviated LoL — is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game where players work together in teams of five to destroy a series of enemy structures while preventing their five opponents from doing the same to their own base. At Penn, there’s a LoL club with 361 Facebook members, and even more students play casually outside of the club.

Many, including myself, follow the professional LoL scene, where professional players in organized teams compete against each other in a way reminiscent of major league sports, complete with coaches, sponsors and screaming audiences. In 2014, more people watched the League of Legends World Championship Finals than the World Series or NBA Finals.

Video games are incredibly addictive, and do not appear to be the most productive way to spend our day. Yet many Penn students still play games, from extremely light iPhone apps like Candy Crush all the way to hardcore, grindfest console games like Fallout 4. Are we all just wasting our time?

Although there are certainly drawbacks to excessive gaming, it’s also worth pointing out the upsides of playing video games, and how gaming can be used to motivate people to solve complicated tasks that could otherwise not be done.

Penn students participate in all sorts of other time consuming extracurricular activities such as sports, clubs or even the school newspaper. Many have value beyond simply being a fun hobby. For example, many believe the discipline gained from playing sports improves career success and work ethic years down the line. In the same vein, there are many opportunities for growth and self-improvement that video games like LoL provide:

1) Teamwork: Players are matched a team of 5 people, all playing different roles, and the game is designed in such a way that players are dependent on working with others in order to win. Like many tasks in real life, cooperation is essential and a lack of individual skill can easily be offset by a team effectively working together.

2) Thinking ahead: As you improve your mechanics and fundamentals, the game becomes more mentally focused. Eventually, after playing enough games, you can begin predicting what will occur in advance. Indeed, the best players seem to know exactly what their opponents plan on doing long before it actually happens, and can respond to it quicker and better. This sort of foresight is incredibly useful in real-life fields such as business or law, and is arguably another word for “experience.”

3) Accepting defeat: LoL has a skill-based matchmaking system that matches you with equally proficient players to ensure that you win roughly 50 percent of the time. Unfortunately, this means you also lose 50 percent of the time. Even the best players in the world still lose roughly 40 percent of their games. Much like real life, it is possible for an individual to do everything right and still lose.

And video games teach all these skills while still being fun.

If you need more evidence that video games are worthwhile, Jane McGonigal argues in her book “Reality is Broken” — far more effectively than I ever could — that millions of Americans play video games in some capacity. She writes — and I agree — that video games have merit beyond killing time and that using the principles developers have pioneered will allow us to confront complicated problems we would otherwise be unable to solve.

My own psychology class linked us to a site called Eyewire, a video game designed by Princeton researchers to help map out the brain. It essentially turns the tedious task of mapping out the locations and connections of various neurons, a problem too complicated for computers to complete, into something enjoyable humans can easily do. As such, by crowdsourcing this complicated task into something enjoyable, significant headway has been made into the overarching project of mapping the brain.

Although video games have addictive qualities, that doesn’t mean we should write them off entirely. They have the ability to develop important skills applicable to the rest of our lives, and solve otherwise impossible problems. And they do this while being fun.

I certainly won’t stop playing anytime soon.

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