Watch a fun movie or go for fine dining; these are the prime weekend savior plans. Out of these, lately, gathering for slumber and playing video games and desire for gaming swords have also become one of the few significant sources of entertainment among the youth and kids. With the ever-increasing versions coming out every now and then, leading to advancement in the gaming industry, there’s no surprise that people are getting hooked on this trend.
Gaming fanatics completely focus their mind on playing video games and invest their time, energy, and even their pocket money, in updating their gaming collections.
On average there are currently over 34 million core gamers in the United States, spending on average of 22 hours every week in gaming. That’s a huge number.
These numbers should be put to use by making gamers better learners.
How Gaming?
An interesting research has been recently published in Carnegie Mellon University states that an average young person today, with a strong gamer culture, would have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. This is an intriguing number of hours as approximately 10,080 hours is the time a child in the US spends in school from class 5th to high school graduation. This learning equivalent to game learning brings out in support of the context.
Utilizing gaming in some of the prime learning activities can be a great tool in creating socially and emotionally skilled kids.
Lately, it has been observed that few very talented people are unable to focus on the small tasks, having a hard time remembering stuff, or even after spending hours on the same task they are not able to finish it.
Honestly, either video gaming or social media addiction, most of us find ourselves distracted from the important tasks.
Recent studies have shown that most of us suffer from attention deficiency and lack focus that affects our learning.
Outdated Learning concepts
Another possible reason for that might be that our teaching and learning ways are so outdated that sometimes you even get bored just by teaching them.
Learning should be fun and focus on improving the skills rather than communicating knowledge without wisdom. It should be done through ways that add color and life to the learning process. Through such ways that make learning interesting.
What’s the link here then?
To establish that, a prime question that arises here is whether the ‘fun learning’ concept can be imparted through gaming? Can video games be trusted for the improvement in SEL (Social Emotional Learning) among children and youth for that matter?
Considerably increasing the gaming hours can increase the SEL, helping our kids and youth resolve their problems leading to gain remarkable success and much more.
Mythical Gamers
Though increased technological advancement has not, in any way, decreased the social anxiety and focus deficiency but it has busted wide open few vague myths about gaming.
An antisocial, weak-minded, gaming addict child has been eliminated. As it is evident that intellectual and literary skills of gaming individuals are in no way less than non-gamers.
There is a remarkable increase in the number of sad, depressed individuals among youth who are finding pleasure in solving the virtual issues and gaining success in those. Wiping tears is hard, so is ditching your diet plan for just a fun barter or witty repartees over the chunky monkey.
Gamers find the solution to all their problems in gaming worlds. They solve what is broken in their real world by fixing their virtual world. Let’s play a game, save her and also save yourself from the social anxiety and pressure.
This is the case with most of us, as the extent of positivity and pleasure that epic win has is incomparable. It lets you achieve what otherwise seems to be impossible.
We completely focus and dedicate our time to that. Dedication and focus are some of the skills that go undiscovered in an individual in normal life; i.e. not exactly lacking but not using them. This leads to developing the idea that problems are easy to solve in games than in real world.
The focus that a gamer uses to lead himself towards the epic win is the one we need to impart to them always if we want them to be epic learners and problem solvers. The ones who in fact against all odds knows how to win and achieve his goal.
Gaming gives you positive feedback and quick responses, that serves as a great confidence and motivation boost for individuals to solve gaming problems. This optimism and motivation create a sense of achievement that we lack in the real world. I mean seriously no one gives us a level up in the real world for achievements, which lands us in a no motivational zone.
This immediate optimism allows gamers to not just sit around with their gaming scores but they have an urgent need to solve them and have a level up in their ‘gaming’ world.
Gamers might be procrastinators in real life but are not in virtual world. These skills of gamers need to be utilized in the real world that land gamers to better learning and being more skilled individuals for their own success and success in general.
Gamers engage themselves in for this brainstorming hard work and productivity with the choice. They consider games with all the knowledge and rules their happy job. They find bliss in achieving what we normally are unable to in real life with all the hard play. This contented hard work and productivity are the qualities learned by gamers through their online or PS worlds that really help them in becoming more skillful and learned individuals.
Gaming teaches gamers to be better at being socially interactive and has that values of trust and cooperation everyone seeks to achieve social success. Either playing against opponents or with team players, they learn how to tackle each social emotion of success and failure with their peers. Gaming can make socially and emotionally better individuals.
These skills let you enable gamers to be better learners. Through virtual superpowers, video games instill in gamers the SE superpowers making them super empowered hopefully skilled individuals. Gamers are not just exactly only good at gaming they are good at creating a virtual world out there for gamers, we can solve the problems for a better world and better learning.
This an intuitive idea but few of the games listed below can help prove that and let this sink in a better way.
Legend of Zelda Series Swords
Created by Shigeru Miyamoto, developed and published by Nintendo, Legend of Zelda is an action thriller fantasy video game series. The game constitutes puzzle solving gaming, along with action-adventure tasks. Some of the occasional tasks include game role-plays and racing.
Much learning in just this much descriptive characteristics of this game, right. But this is just the trailer.
So, the game actually revolves around saving princess Zelda from the Ganondorf the primary villain of the series, done by the protagonist of the game, Link, in the setting of a state named Hyrule. The same hero has recurring appearances in multiple versions and the antagonist Vaati who appears in later series.
Each newer version contained new characteristics but the Legend of Zelda video games contains puzzle solving, strategic and action gameplay that was consistent throughout the series. The story commonly involves a relic known as the Triforce, a set of three golden triangles of omnipotence. Puzzle solving is followed by continuous rewards in the gameplay. Solving puzzles revolve around locating dungeons, fighting enemies and defeating the dungeon boss. Then they contain the main item inside each dungeon that is needed to advance to the boss. Locating these items eventually help you to find and fight the dungeon’s boss. Later versions also including Zelda the princess fighting with Link and other protagonists to save her kingdom.
All the above gameplay characteristics support the development of skills in the Zelda gamers, reinforcing learning and problem solving and SE learning.
Devil May Cry Swords
Devil may cry is a combat action game that involves strategic fighting gameplay. The game revolves around main character Dante’s vengeance of his mother’s murder by eradicating demons.
This gameplay includes highly styled, strategic combat. DMC game emphasis on puzzle solving strategy action combats with minimum damage. The games were later modified to let players undergo varied style combats to increase their ranks, requiring to modify their combat styles for increased level ups.
So another game for the learning.
A lot can be learned from Dante’s revenge missions and strategic puzzle combats. Another level up achieved in SE learning through gaming.
So, Let’s do it
Nothing can be a total loss or total win.
Utilizing gaming for learning benefits can be a maximum win-win situation as you are not imparting learning without actually making them go through the rigorous learning process.
We have these outstanding capabilities of optimism, productivity and learning to weave the social fabric being developed in gamers. These can be put to the best use to change the learning environment in general and to create better-learned individuals for the future world.
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