Do MMORPGs Have a Positive Impact in Your Life? | One Good Roll | MMORPG.com

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Do MMORPGs Have a Positive Impact in Your Life? | One Good Roll | MMORPG.com

This week's One Good Roll was inspired by a now deleted post Steven happened upon on the MMORPG Reddit over the past week. He poses the question, If someone were to ask you to weigh your experiences with MMORPG's, how would you perceive gaming has impacted your life?

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Viper482

Sadly I find the answer is typically no more than yes....toxic players see to that.

Scot

Of course they have had a positive impact, what a strange question; we are not martyrs throwing ourselves at MMORPG's while knowing how dreadfully they will affect us, quite the opposite.

Here is just a couple of things. They taught me how to handle groups of people using incredibly basic text communications, anything else I have used since then was a doddle. They introduced me to new friends in real life meetups.

ET3D

While I don't think that MMORPGs are bad, I tend to think that these days there's nothing special about them. 15-20 years ago MMORPGs were a dominant online genre. Now they're a niche one. The most prevalent games are now multiplayer, and "MMORPG", as a strict genre, means little to most people, which is why years ago this site stopped being only about them.

I wonder if anyone here has had any truly positive experience from MMORPGs in the past few years. I wonder if there's anyone under 25 here whose life has somehow been transformed by an MMORPG. (Are there even people here who are under 25?)

Tokken

Yes, they are good stress reducers when home from work.

cheyane

I think one of the skills you pick is tolerance. I feel this is a very important life skill. In life generally you tend to just avoid the things that require patience and tolerance of behaviour because you can physically walk away from the person or group of persons unless they are very important to you. 

In a group in the game you need the others so you're forced to tolerate and practice patience. This does not come naturally. It requires practice and patience.

Communication is the other skill. I know a lot of people who lack this skill where speech is required but excel in giving text directions. They also improve languages. I personally know of people who have confessed to learning English through MMORPGs. 

What a great medium huh?

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

DigDuggy

For me, that would be a yes. I get to meet a lot of interesting people from around the world. It gives me a bit of escapism from the daily grind. I don't take things very seriously on the interwebs, so I find that even a lot of the asswipes amusing.

Angrakhan

It can be positive if you have the right mindset, and it can be destructive like other addictions if you have the wrong mindset. If it's just entertainment, down time and time with friends then it's a huge positive. It can be like therapy to help you deal with stress and find joy doing things that are fun with friends especially if those friends are remote. However if it's an obsession in which you spend as much or more time than you do your job it can cost you friends, family, thousands of dollars (thanks FTP business model!), and even your job. It's all up to you and how you approach it.

Alverant

It gives me something to do with others, which accounts for most of my non-work related social activity.

Valdheim

Through MMORPGs I've at least learned how to type fast and improved my english quite a lot.

Ulrick28

I met and married my current partner of now 20 years via Everquest. I would say that has been a positive impact on my life

Kyleran

Valdheim said:

Through MMORPGs I've at least learned how to type fast and improved my english quite a lot.

Me too, and I was born in the US. 

Also kept me from pursuing a career as a high level financial executive and corporate raider which I could easily have seen myself doing.

Happy that I was able to keep my soul.

KroxMalon

They used to be. But sadly they are no longer built for me or my generation.

Thee gameplay and features are just no longer my cup-of-tea sadly.

No more does it make me feel like an adventurer on a journey. Now I feel like a participant in a casino rave waiting for it to burn down.

WarWitch

Yes wife and daughter play eso. Admired for years on some the old muds enjoy helping people etc . It's nice to meet people and learn different world views from all over the world rl.

Mendel

MMORPGs have been a good thing for me.  They were very good in the early years, with lots of things to learn, people to meet, and enjoy time with.  As they progressed, they became more job-like, filled with intolerant and impatient people.  Then too many games tried to market themselves as MMOs, and the genre evolved in directions that simply weren't interesting to me.

Throwbacks and 'old school' games in development are trying to recreate the first generation; I want games that build on the original MMORPGs without some of the same decisions that the 2nd generation games made.  Invariably, I find those decisions to be made around the financial aspects of games, not the game play.  Someone please embrace the RP side of the equation!

cameltosis

MMORPGs aren't really doing anything for me any more, as none of them are really worth my time. But they certainly provided a lot of positives for me in the past:


1) Touch-typing / speed typing. Before MMOs, I could write quicker than I could type, but since MMOs it's been the reverse. and it's a skill that doesn't seem to fade, despite not really playing mmos much over the last 9 years.


2) Leadership skills. Approximately 5 years of running an online guild through 3 different games, starting at age 22. Being responsible for 100+ active gamers at that age gave me experience I wouldnt have gotten in real life, and thus helped get me promotions irl.


3) Communication skills. Leading raids comprised of men, women and children with a wide variety of ages, skill levels and languages.....yeh, u have to get good at explaining stuff. Working as a developer, this came in handy as I was usually the only one in the company who could convert "regular" (dumbass) words into technical language, and vice versa. When I started helping out our sales team, this ability dramatically improved our sales rates.....not that i got any sort of commission, ungrateful bastards!


4) Familiarity with percentages. Humans are generally shit when it comes to statistics, we have no natural feel for them and what we do have gets warped by hope or pessimism. But soooooo many years of crit chance, multiplayers, block/parry/evade, you finally get an appreciation for how those abstract numbers "feel".


5) Problem solving / critical thinking. Games are nothing but problems waiting for you to solve, and hopefully u learn something in the solving. Sadly, the majority of games are so shallow and simple that there isn't much to solve or learn, because i solved and learned those lessons 20+ years ago. But occasionally, a game comes along that pushes those boundaries. LotRO and its deep combat mechanics was one such game, encouraging creative thinking in a way no other game has ever done for me. It taught me that just because a solution exists, doesn't mean its the best solution or the only solution, or even the right solution for u and your friends. Keep exploring all the options, get creative in your thinking. This has definitely helped me as a project manager IRL and helped me seem wiser than I really am.




I've skipped over social benefits, girlfriends and that sort of stuff because thats already been covered by others.

I will also say that the five different skillsets I listed above may well have come about anyway, there is no way of knowing. As a programmer / software engineer, chances are i would have ended up touch typing eventually.......but MMOs made me get there quicker! I would have probably gotten leadership skills through work, but I would have likely had to wait 5 or 10 years to get there.

cameltosis

I also like to think of the skills I've learned through gaming in general, some might call them useless skills but I like to think of them as skills I have yet to put into practice!

For example:


1) Racing Car Driver
I have memorised many tracks layouts, raced at incredible speeds in very fast cars, learned all about racing lines, drafting, late braking and all that. But apart from a bit of karting as a child, I've never raced a car. One day.....


2) Shooting stuff
I've never been in the military, a criminal gang, and guns are mostly illegal here in the UK. But I've shot enough guns in games to learn about the effect of gravity on projectiles, how far to lead a target when aiming. I took up clay pidgeon shooting for a year and those skills gave me a massive advantage compared to other beginners.


3) Flying Space Ships
Playing Elite: Dangerous without flight assists is hard! Learning how to control a ship when there's no gravity and no resistence takes a lot of skill, admittedly im not that great at it either. But, should the day arrive in my lifetime when space travel becomes accessible....I'll be winning!


4) How to survive an apocolypse
Should the day ever arrive that there is an apocolypse, and should I survive judgement day, I like to think I'll have an advantage over non-gamers. I've learned what to prioritise, what to avoid etc. Plus, I know that if I need to build myself some shelter, I can just punch a tree enough times to get some wooden planks to build a cabin! I mean, what non-gamer would ever think about punching trees to get wood? Idiots, the lot of them!