We’ve all played games at some point in our lives. Whether it’s a game of charades with loved ones during the holiday season, a game of football in the park, or a game of Candy Crush Saga on our smartphone.
Games are fun and a great form of entertainment that’s far more interactive than watching movies and TV, but they can also offer several useful benefits that can help us in other areas of our lives.
Games Can Improve Our Cognition
Even when you don’t realise it, playing games usually requires you to give your brain a workout. The most obvious games for strengthening your grey matter are board games like chess and card games like poker.
Both of these require you to think strategically, analysing the moves your opponent makes and trying to predict what they’re going to do next. In chess, many players spend hours memorising the different plays that can be deployed on the board so that they can effectively counter them.
In poker, players must remember all of the different hands, including their hierarchy, so they can decide whether to call, raise, or fold with the cards they’re holding. It’s also important to be able to read the body language of other players, an important skill that can be put to use in many areas of our professional and personal lives.
Games Can Improve Our Reaction Times
Having good reaction times can be vital in some real-life situations. While driving, reacting quickly could help you avoid a car crash, and when playing sports, fast reaction times could improve your performance.
It may seem unbelievable at first, but we can improve our reaction times by playing certain video games. Research published in the Computers in Human Behavior journal shows that people who play first-person shooters have faster reaction times than those that play other genres of video game.
This wasn’t the only study to find these results either; several other studies have reported similar trends, including one that compared people that played Call of Duty 2 and The Sims 2. It found that the gamers who played COD2 could react 25% faster to their test than those that didn’t.
This makes sense, since games like Call of Duty and CounterStrike are fast-paced, requiring players to remain alert and quickly fire their weapons to attack enemies before they’re attacked themselves.
Games Can Make us More Social
Despite the popular stereotypes of gamers playing alone at home, isolated from the world, the exact opposite is true.
Playing both traditional card and board games as well as video games can make us more social. The former requires us to be in the same room as our opponents, creating the opportunity for socialising in person, while the latter gives us the opportunity to develop relationships with likeminded people from all over the world.
This is why regular game nights with friends have been a popular activity for a long time, giving people a reason to come together, and providing the social interaction that is important to our overall wellbeing.
Video games include voice and text chat functionality, allowing players to chat with each other before, during, and after playing. There are also large communities for fans of particular titles with forums, social media groups, and even in-person meetups. There are also sites offering guides to things like these well trusted Tarkov cheats to enable people to help enhance their gameplay and put them on top of the pack.
Games Can Improve Our Arithmetic Skills
For some people, numbers come naturally; we can add, subtract, multiply and divide without any trouble. For others, even the thought of having to manipulate some numbers can bring on panic and anxiety.
Basic maths skills are important though. Being able to create a household budget, measure up for a new living room carpet and work out your taxes all require you to do some simple calculations.
Thankfully, playing games can help us to be more comfortable with numbers and improve our skills.
For example, playing the word game Scrabble forces you to add the values of your tiles together and multiply the relevant numbers when you place them on certain squares. The game of darts requires you to add the numbers on the board and do simple multiplication when you land on the double and triple areas.
Games can help us in all sorts of ways, and the great thing about it is that we often don’t realize it because we’re having so much fun!
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