Impact of Gaming on Social Skills

04 Oct, 2022
Posted by: Karthik Ramesh

If you’re here, it’s ok to assume you’re tired of the mainstream cliched representation of gaming in the media. The same old “ Gaming is only preferred by Introverts” or “Gamers are lonely people who don’t see the light of day”

Yea that’s not always what gaming is. We want to highlight the aspects of gaming that actually makes you socialise better. We want you to be able to retort to people whenever they bring up the negative social impacts of gaming to combat them with facts of your own. Now let's jump in.

Building Relationships

It doesn’t need any studies to prove it (but there are many) . You know this is true if you’ve played any online game ever. You make so many interactions and even so many bonds. All it takes is just one friend request and you’re golden. You then go on to play ranked grinds together and you have each other's back, you talk strategy, you make decisions together affecting the game, you bond over your favourite games.

It shows you how important it is to listen and understand the person on the other end.

Building and Managing a team

In team games such as Valorant and BGMI, you’re forced to work in a team building environment. You play with the team, you ride with the team, you die with the team.

Long hours of playing team games show that you will learn to work with other people better, compromising and working through differences easily, combining multiple skills to work better,

Video games online obviously allocate spaces where a person becomes the leader unintentionally or they rise up to be the unofficially.

Multiple studies also show that Offline Games also pave the way for leadership roles as the Players have to take decisions and usually the characters in video games have the mainstream leader role and they follow similar tropes of leading a group or making decisions for the team.

(i.e; Red Dead Redemption 2, Walking dead telltale series, Master Chief from Halo)

Empathy and individuality

After one toxic game/Bad game experience, you tell it to your squadmates and they immediately feel bad for you and understand the pain, you must be imagining a bad game experience right now. A sharing of experiences breeds empathy and since one will have many shared experiences in game, empathy is picked up easily amongst the gaming community.

The other byproduct of the empathy of gaming is the understanding of an individual, or easily understanding and being able to talk to people of various backgrounds. Nowadays due to online gaming, a gamer can meet people from across the world.

Patience and Defusing Situations

Not all your games go great. Every gamer can attest to that. The thing is when unruly situations happen in game. You’ll have to deal with them at that moment since otherwise the game can be lost. Whether it’s the ability to stay put or vocally deal with the situation in that moment. Games offer you a chance to go through this encounter in a low stakes manner as the worst case scenario is you lose the game.

Confidence and Emotional Control

Confidence, excitement, and emotional connection are some of the many experiences video games can give you. Scientific studies on stress-relief through gaming show just how refreshing video games can be.

Being able to communicate better with all kinds of people can boost your self-esteem like nothing else.

Additionally, your braver attitude feeds into your social skills, creating a constant cycle of self-improvement.

The thing is too much of anything is a bad thing. Even games, we’d urge you to keep it limited for an optimum experience. This post is a reaction to the numerous posts out there about the negatives of gaming, which are true. However we wanted the conversation to stay a bit more nuanced and balanced