How Have Video Games Changed Our Lives?

I’m an avid gamer, and I feel lucky to have grown up witnessing this modern age of gaming. With graphics and hardware capabilities at an all time high, story tellers can create an immersive virtual reality and even begin to place the players directly into the game. If this isn’t suitable, they can bring the game into the real world.

Virtual Reality

Virtuix offers a product called “Omni” (an omni-directional treadmill, which is combined with a VR headset). In order to create a fully immersive world- not just a helmet and joystick/controller- Omni offers the option for you to “walk” your character. When you move, your character moves. This helps your brain forget you’re simulating an experience. This sort of technology is great for a game, but also for training exercises in the military for example.

Augmented Reality

Envisics showed off their futuristic SatNav at CES2019. In a nutshell this is an advanced holographic heads-up-display with markers for:

• any dangerous objects like pedestrians
• line indicators for which lane you should be in
• interesting points
• speedometer
• destination

This sort of technology may not be directly named as a result of gaming, though is the sort of thing you would have seen in games many years prior. Driving games/simulators would have paved the way for this technology; when the Augmented Reality technology was there, Envisics would know what to do with it.

Jobs and Exposure

I think it’s important to note that video games are not just an escape, though, they can teach us a lot in our real lives. Multiplayer gaming can require the set-up/configuration of servers in order to connect to your friends/others. Growing up this taught me a lot about networks, IPs and firewalls.

Facing a connectivity problem for me wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it gave me an opportunity to go away and research the issue. I think this helped me see that I wanted a job in computing, and I think the exposure would help broaden the desire for a job in the industry.

Charity

My final point is certainly not the least. A lot of money is raised for good causes when it comes to gaming. HumbleBundle is a website which offers discounted games and allows you to select which charities you want to donate a share of the money to. They have raised $142,000,000 currently. This is just one example.

Conclusion

I want it to be known the next time you tell your children that they’re spending too long on their computer, Xbox, etc. that gaming isn’t the enemy. A lot of good comes from the gaming industry.

Disclaimer: though they should take frequent breaks!

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