Intel Fade

Our generation was the first to grow up staring at screens with our little sweaty hands wrapped around a controller or mouse, and there really has been quite a few horror stories about what that is doing to us. Some of the horror stories are pretty funny to watch. This kids World O’ Warcraft account was just shut off by his parents, probably as a tool to helping him improve grades or as a punishment for some social misdeed. Some psychiatrists are now looking to add a diagnosis of “Video Game Addiction” to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

It brings me back to “discussions”(read: me getting hollered at) in my youth where my Dad would tell me what he thought of me spending my spare time sitting in front of Nintendo, then Sega Genesis, and eventually the computer. My Dad didn’t know what he started when he wrapped the Nintendo Entertainment System in holiday paper and stuffed it under our little tree. In the following years seeing me constantly in front of my little 15 inch gaming monitor, he must have despaired at what that Christmas gift did to my potential, my college chances, and the odds of me landing a good job in my old age.

What my Dad didn’t know at the time was that while he fretted over my seemingly fading potential, his Christmas gift actually led to a great career, and a natural aptitude for leadership.

Nintendo, Sega, N64, Super Nintendo, and Xbox all led me to the world of the PC. The PC had so much gaming potential, but was extremely fickle. At that time, we lived in a world that was command line driven. The fancy graphical user interfaces of today were just a twinkle in the eye of Steve Jobs(Bill Gates was about to steal that twinkle). My father did no approve, and I got no help at all in setting up my games. When I inevitably broke the slow, beastly personal computer that my family shared, there was no chance of my $4-per-week allowance covering repairs or tech support. My Dad, who believed these games would be the equivalent of hard drugs in my life, was clearly not going to pay for me to destroy my future. So I had to RTFM, and fix the thing myself. I had to learn command line, and had to learn how to troubleshoot.

As gaming progressed, and my dream of an online battlefield came true, I was lucky enough to land an internship in computers during the beginning of the .com boom in the late 1990’s. I was amazed at the game Tribes, a game which allowed up to 40 players to all wage war online. I couldn’t get enough, even though I was playing on a slow and graphically stale laptop. My dial up meant I was one of those high ping kids, and I hated the low ping bastards who seemed to effortlessly mow me down. But, I loved it, so instead of give up, I tweaked. I tweaked my network settings, I tweaked my laptop to run the bareessentials and eek just a little more performance out of the clunker.

I loved it and spent so much time on it, that my team {MC} eventually asked me to help the team by becoming a captain. In later years, so did my Counterstrike team, {{COMC}. Since I had some technical aptitude from tweaking my computer, fixing the old rig at Dad’s house, and I was now an IT consultant, I was not only the team leader on the battlefield, but it was on me to keep our game and web server fast and available. I used those technical skills, combined with my developing leadership skills, and found myself also filling the role of a community builder. I set up mods on our Counterstrike server to track statistics, play fun sounds on people’s computers when they text shouted someone’s name, and link all of it to our web page.

As I got into Battlefield 1942, I found a team -TD-. I quickly was asked to be a captain, and again found myself stepping into the role of technical admin, community builder, and team captain. This leadership meant that I had to identify what skills my team had, what skills we needed, and I had to work to develop those skills in my current members or recruit new players. Toward the end of BF1942, I met up with people who are still personal friends, =KHA=.

Again, I was immediately asked to be a captain. I was the technical lead for our servers, and I became one of the community leaders. We competed very seriously, on multiple ladders, and were always near the top of the rankings. We had great players. When those players had difficulties on their computers, I used remote sessions before it wasfashionable to do so, and helped to fix them. This was all because if our best players were on the sidelines, our team was not going to perform as well as it could.

My gaming career prepared me for leadership more than any college class I could have taken. I learned to identify what skills our team needed to succeed on the virtual battlefield, and then to map out what our team had. I was forced to learn community building to ensure that the severs we collectively paid for were always filled up, and to bring in talent our team was in need of. The responsibilities I had to my team members drove me to learn more and more about troubleshooting desktops. My role as server admin built my aptitude for system administration more than any $3000 5-day Microsoft MCSE seminar could have. I learned that the role of leadership included a surprising amount of interpersonal work, keeping team members motivated and not fighting amongst ourselves.

Maybe the parents who shut off that kids WoW account think they are helping him. Maybe they are.
But if my Dad had decided to cancel my accounts, steal the plug for the computer, or snag the video cable to the Sega, I would have had to learn all of these things in the high stakes world of careers, instead of being able to make the big mistakes where it didn’t matter. Video games, as strange as it is, were as effective for me as college and leadership seminars. And they were way, way more fun.