A Case for Gaming
Image Credit: Beginners Tech
Throughout my life I was constantly reminded of the negative effects gaming would have on my life. As a kid, I chose to ignore them. As a teenager, I decided I was smarter than them. As a young adult, I believed I knew what was best for me.
In my mid to late twenties I decided they were right all along. I believed I couldn’t professionally excel at the rate I wanted to while “wasting” my time playing video games. It wasn’t until I was in my very early thirties that I realized just how wrong we all were.
Gaming isn’t something that has to be used to waste your time. It’s something I have been able to channel into an outlet that, to this day, is the key to maintaining my mental health. I can lose myself in the story, and the hero’s journey becomes my own. I’m invested in the storylines and the characters that have so gracefully helped me keep my sanity while climbing the corporate ladder.
I will admit, once I discovered my professional ambition and tailored my time around finding new ways to succeed, gaming just didn’t fit. Instead of staying up and gaming with my buddies, I was now spending my evenings at the office- always trying to stay a step above the competition. While this seems to be the way of most people of our generation, it only lasted so long for me. I found myself yearning for more.
By this time, I was married and started realizing that there was more to life than work, and being a workaholic wasn’t the quickest way to becoming the person I wanted to be. I wanted to be able to unplug, give my mind a break and create more time to spend with my family.
Gaming is one of the tools that helped me do just that. A good racing game allows me to improve my reflexes and reaction times and it gives me an adrenaline rush in a safe environment. Sports games like Madden and PGA Tour Golf drives my need for competition with myself and the online playing community. FPS campaigns or RPGs allow me to become someone else, following the hero’s journey and living with them through that arc. Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Warzone or Epic Game’s Fortnite makes me nostalgic for Goldeneye on my N64 console and has allowed me to start spending more time with my nephews.
Those escapes are my way to temporarily press pause on whatever is going on in my life, and for a few minutes, be completely present in an experience. For me, gaming is meditative. Gaming allows my mind to go to a place of calm that it otherwise could not.
About 5 years ago, when I began to dive back into the world of gaming, my career began to take off. Once again, I began to climb the corporate ladder, but this time, I had renewed energy and motivation because I knew I had the tools to make it through the long haul. I’m now the CEO of a tech company that challenges me every day and I have gaming to thank for teaching me how to balance the responsibilities in a corporate world with the need to constantly be making connections with those closest to me.