How Video Games Taught Me Personal Responsibility
Blame, procrastination, self-sacrifice – these terrible three can ruin your career and limit your personal success. We use bad templates a lot, especially in the workplace. I noticed one place in my life where these features are not visible anywhere. While playing video games.
When I play a game and face a puzzle or challenging boss fight, instead of blaming, I start looking for ways to overcome the problem.
I remember my breakthrough very early on when I played Mega Man 2 on the NES. I was stuck at one stage, unable to progress.
Every time I lost my life, I returned to the challenge, trying to figure out how I can overcome this obstacle. I didn’t blame the game, its designers, the US president, my parents, or even the publisher, Capcom.
Instead, I took responsibility for my actions , the way I dealt with the problems, and the results that followed. In the end, I figured everything out – and felt great satisfaction from what I had achieved.
Lessons from unexpected places
Sometimes lessons are learned the hard way. David Hayter, the writer and voice for Solid Snake’s Metal Gear Solid series , told me about a lesson he learned from Oddworld: Abe’s Oddessy . “Before you jump, you must be right at the ledge, otherwise you will be destroyed by some terrible mutant crab.” You know, he’s right. We often have to solve problems experimentally and learn from our mistakes.
One-touch spikes. Seemingly harmless mushrooms. Water. Fire. Flying happy faces. Electric algae. Any number of innocent or random things can end the game with a little warning. This mutant crab can give you the first ten tries, but you can do it with the eleventh. This principle applies to our lives as well.
In the professional world, nobody cares about excuses, only results. Intentions are not as important as where we end up. While this may sound harsh, think about what happens in a video game when you are “about to jump,” but never press a button before heading into the bottomless pit.
Intention does not isolate us from the consequences of our actions.
Over the course of my career, I’ve been guilty of just turning off my controller and blaming bad game design for my inability to get ahead, but I realized that my inaction would not advance me at all. I had to take matters into my own hands .
How we win in video games
We are more than just perseverance, we are responsible for our actions during the game. Then I noticed that when I was playing video games and not asking, “Why can’t I do this?” I asked myself, “How can I do this?” This is just one of the areas in which video game players have developed a skill that has amazing applications in the real word, if we are brave enough to apply it.
In the book QBQ! The question behind the question , John G. Miller, offers a simple yet elegant approach to creating better questions; and better questions lead to better answers. Here’s a crash course on how to ask better questions with QBQ! An approach:
- Ask a question that begins with “What” or “How” (avoid using “why,” “when,” or “who”).
- Use the personal pronoun “I” (not them, they, [insert another person’s name]).
- Focus on specific action.
While this sounds incredibly simple, it is not the standard approach of many people. For some time now, I have been struggling with bad questions and thought processes that have put me in a frustrating position. If you are facing problems or unhappy with a situation in your life, ask yourself the best question to make a difference. When I stopped blaming others for the situations I faced, I found myself liberating more energy and focusing on achieving goals that had been in limbo for a long time.
Here are two examples of how I am restructuring my questions:
- Before: “When will someone offer me a better job?” After: “How can I improve my career growth?”
- Before: “Why don’t we have additional resources to get the job done?” After: “What can I do to get the job done with what I have in front of me?”
See the difference? Despite the fact that this is a subtle structure, in practice it is life-changing. Ask yourself better questions. It works because you focus on what you can do, not what you think is outside your control. In the end, I can only control myself and my actions. Life gets so much better when I focus on what I can do instead of what I can’t.
Using the skill of personal responsibility will earn the respect of others both on a personal and professional level, and will also make winning in life almost as easy as winning a video game.
This post is adapted from an excerpt from Mastering the Game: What Video Games Can Teach Us About Success in Life by John Harrison .