Many things. When I was a kid, I learned:

History (Sid Meier's Civilization)

The original Civilization had a two page information coming up upon acquiring something. If you learned about a unit, a building, a wonder. One page was stats, the other page was actual history of the unit/building. Of course I read both pages. And during history class I noticed many things were already familiar to me because I had been playing Civilization.

A foreign language (Sierra's and Lucasfilm's point-and-click games)

When I was a kid there were no applications in my native language. Two friends of mine and I started to play point-and-clicks and therefore had to learn English. We played in rotation, one uses the mouse, other reads words from the dictionary and the third one tries to come up with ideas and after a short while we switch places. In our school system the numbering goes from 4 (failed) to 10 (perfect score). Our English numbers were somewhere 6-7, maybe an 8 sometimes. But when we started playing point-and-clicks all of our English numbers jumped straight to 9-10.

Of course there are various games where puzzle solving helps with real life conundrums, RPG games teaching that choices have consequences, shooters and driving games teach reflexes and performance under pressure, and other things, but the most concrete examples I had growing up were history and a foreign language. Larry Laffer was my English teacher.

When I was younger I had really bad hand-eye coordination. Playing video games helped that a lot. I also learned a lot of history and science from historical based strategy games that were always some of my favorites.

When I was 7-16 I learned from video games and gamebooks, while others learned from books and movies. Today I am as stupid as I was then but I have never forgotten what it means to be happy and most of my friends have forgotten. Observation is for passive understanding and participation is for active understanding.

If we want our AI to be a good being, we must ensure the practice of being a human with a whole range of necessary feelings and emotions.

If we want to have good pilots, we must ensure practice, preferably good flight simulators and, ultimately, training flights.

To meditate is not just observing your own thoughts, it is to produce no thoughts or willed vibrations.

If you want to be the PC hero of your life, not just an NPC or an observer or an extra... play your life, build a character, and experience something ... right now ...

Video games taught me that. Interact with the encountered world or die trying:)

Am I supposed to name one game? Game&Watch? Tetris? Pong? Manic Miner? Metal Slug? Prince of Persia? Tekken? Diggers? Mortal Kombat? Video chess and pinball? Micro Machines? Battlecity? Quake? Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy? Super Mario Bros? Elasto Mania? Transport Tycoon de Luxe? Ace Ventura? Gta? Pontifex? Abe`s Odysee? Baldur`s Gate? Gothic? ...newer games? Surely missed some titles to add later.

Good quest gog.com! G`old Games!

Finding Paradise taught me that I should not be in conflict with my past and look for what I would not have done and that the most important thing is to enjoy the little moments with your loved ones, which are what is truly important.

Game showed artifacts and other graphical glitches -> old GPU was on its way out and needed replacing.
Game framerate dropped after some gaming -> Computer case and cooling was inadequate.
Game made whole computer shut down -> Power supply was too weak.
Could not connect to all other players in online game -> Was accidentally behind double NAT.

And so on...

Yeah, games taught all sorts of cool stuff about computers, electronics and networking in general.

Since I was introduced to video games by my aunt and uncle, I have travelled to many different worlds to date.

I have been able to learn/relate historical events in a fun way, with games like Age of Empires, Sid Meier's Civilization, Assassins Creed series.

I was able to acquire more knowledge about foreign languages, such as English and Japanese. As you can tell, English is not my mother tongue, but it allowed me to become more interested in foreign languages. Literally all the games; and yes, why not Scribblenauts?

I was able to discover and enjoy amazing music as soundtrack in many video games, like Castlevania Symphony of The Night, The Shadow of the Colossus, Super Mario 64/World/RPG, the Doom series, Kingdom hearts, Silent Hill, among with many different masterpieces nowadays (Blasphemous, Hollowknight, etc., etc...).

I was able to learn that you have to be determined and focused on what you want, no matter how hard the path is, if you put your heart and soul into it you will achieve it. Oh yes, from Battletoads (NES) to the Soulsborne series.

And of course, it made me spend the best years of my life together with my siblings, endless nights of fun, or escaping just before mum/dad came to the room to turn it off and pretend we weren't playing... what great memories.

That's why I can't escape video games, even in my 30's, I may be a man, but the good times are there, trapped in time, where I'm still the same old boy. It makes me feel alive, when depression hits, or problems arise... you can always escape to these wonderful different worlds.

My sincere love to all the gamers, creators and the infinite imagination that surrounds this industry.

Thank you.

Probably the biggest thing was thinking outside the box to solve puzzles. I played a lot of point and click adventures and text adventures. Those had puzzles with interesting, often frustrating, solutions that required creative thinking.

The later Ultima games really ramped up the "live up to your values" aspect by showing that your actions, good or bad, would affect your reputation and whether you could succeed at the game.

I learned JavaScript playing Bitburner. It was pretty helpful for the JS problems for a CS course I was doing.

When I was a kid, Sid Meier's Civilization helped me learning my first foreign language, English. As I was interested in history, it provided interesting topics to learn from. Further on in the series, Civilopedia provided plenty of information about different aspects and inventions long time before internet and wikipedia was available.

Before Civilization, I remember playing Word Rescue, that was a classic game to learn English as you had to combine a word to the right picture, like 'pen' to a picture of a pen.

Plenty of other games taught me problem solving, learning simple mechanics (The Incredible Machine -series, I'm looking at you) like tennis ball behaves differently to a bowling ball or how cog-wheels and pulleys work.


Lots of different topics to learn and lot of different games to provide context for different topics.

From puzzle solving in adventure games; learn how to play detective in games; micro-managing NPC's and parties in games for strategic purposes; learning how to build computers built around certain games (especially high-end & demanding games); how to use mods, tweaks, and whatnot with how to fix old games to get them running to better understand both old games & how they operated and how new systems operate; learned how to use software; learned how to improve performance in games w/ software tricks and other things; learn how to analyze things & realize things in grave detail; learned how to write reviews from games; learned how to trouble-shoot hardware issues & software issues; etc etc.

TL;DR - Basically, I have learned how to pay attention to as many details as possible to get objectives done and basically think that I've probably should've been a private eye or a detective in real life. ;)

Ace Harding might've been proud of me.

Oh, and that I've written so many Reviews (especially over on Steam; I really need to write some reviews here on GOG), I also probably also could've been a writer & game reviewer.

I learn about druidism.

The first thing I learn from video games is English. And one of the first English words I learned is "simultaneous", which is quite fancy for an elementary school student. (I learned that word from Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Koei.)

Then Baldur's Gate made me discover the joy of reading good stories in English, which leads me to read The Lord of the Rings in English later. I now work as a freelance translator so in a way video games gave me a career.

I learned many things, one being that parents aren't always right!

I played a lot of video games growing up and my parents would complain that I played games all the time and wasn't like the other kids where we lived. What they didn't seem to understand was that the other kids were out drinking, messing around and ending up in trouble, while me, their kid was safely at home learning English and patience and problem-solving.


And as an adult I have used video games to help a handicapped girl who struggled with planning things in her everyday life and who hardly knew English at all, to become a lot better at reading English and she learned how to plan ahead so she wouldn't live in constant shock and surprise in her everyday life.


Games are good.

As a big fan of the Myst series and any game like it, I learned two lessons, the first is to pay attention to the smallest details because it may just be the answer you're looking for. The second, and perhaps the biggest lesson of all, is that things are not always as they seem, or first appear. When we dig a little deeper, make an effort to probe and search a little longer, to ask questions especially the hard ones, you might just discover that what you thought at first is nowhere close to the reality that it is. Our bias' are sometimes so subconscious that we do not know they exist. But if we push past our comfort zone, beyond the limit where we usually just take it our initial view for granted, we not only learn the truth, but we also become aware of how much our bias' have influenced our decisions, perspective and the like, which can potentially result in you missing out on one of the best moments of your life, or an important clue/message/remedy.

Typing - Typing of the Dead: Overkill

It's not always good to follow - BioShock

Sometimes any choice has little to no impact - Practically any Telltale game

Troubleshooting - By way of getting games to work on a computer.

Asset Management - Getting DOS games to work on a crappy PC and you needed more Conventional Memory