How Online Gaming Helps Build Social Skills and Confidence
For gamers who have been playing online games for a long time, the benefits of their favorite hobby are already evident. Gaming can improve your reflexes (all that mouse clicking, it can improve your spatial perception, it can get your creative juices flowing (designing houses, bases, characters and outfits) and, let’s face it, it’s just so much fun that there’s no reason not to play! Multiplayer games are an excellent way to improve not only all these things we’ve just mentioned, but much more.
If you play poker online, Overwatch online, or if you play World of Warcraft online, there’s a vast gamer community out there waiting to welcome you with open arms!
Community is just what some younger gamers need; a lot has changed in the past few years. Many younger gamers have missed out on activities, work, or university for a whole year or longer. This has set their social skills and confidence in their ability to move through the world around them back a significant amount which is enough to make anyone feel a little unsure of themselves! It is the gaming community and online gaming that they can turn to so as to rebuild these skills and regain their confidence. Many people from older generations may not see how this might be true, so let’s take a closer look.
Working Together
Whether you play single-player, duo, or team games, there’s an element of working together that can help build up your confidence a little bit. When you play team games, the effect comes from an obvious place. Operating as a team in an online game forces even the least socially skilled and confident people into a space where they need to do their best to work together. Different players end up in various roles, teaching people what works for them and what doesn’t and showing them where they excel. If you’ve never understood how to delegate, you’ll learn that in group games as well; whether you want to or not! The only way for a team to succeed is for everyone to work hard at doing their best in the roles they have been assigned. Even playing a solo game can have this effect if the player is communicating with their friends or other community members via a group chat app like Discord. Any social interaction like this, even though it’s not in person, helps sharpen social skills by working together or communicating well.
Performing Tasks Under Pressure
This might not sound like a lot of fun as part of a hobby, but it’s one of the most important aspects of online gaming. There are all kinds of high-pressure situations that you might encounter when gaming: battle or survival scenarios, having to rescue an NPC from the clutches of your arch nemesis, or trying to stay on the track in a particularly challenging racing game. Trying your hand at doing well in pressurized situations can improve your confidence in the long run. What you have to know going in is that you’re probably going to fail a lot before you succeed. Every failure is a lesson in how to do better, and doing something you love really well is the best confidence booster possible.
Community Cares
As a gamer, you have access to a worldwide community made up of literally billions of different kinds of people. Some may think the same way you do; some may come from circumstances you’ve never encountered before. There might be a best friend waiting in the community for you or some people that you’ll just never get along with perfectly, or maybe even a really cool new streamer for you to watch. Overall though, something that can be said for the gaming community is that it looks out for its own. Knowing that you have a community to lean on, near and far, is a huge confidence booster. Interacting with people from different countries and different walks of life is also an excellent way to build up your social skills. You’ll never learn anything new if you’re only ever interacting with people who have had all the same experiences as you!
Wrap Up
The gaming community is a great place to learn a lot of new things: confidence and social skills among them. These are things that you learn as you play without even really noticing that you’re learning, which means you’re getting better at something without even really trying! Now, who wouldn’t love that?
