How computer games saved me from appetite

• The comparison
• Video Games
• How computer games saved me from appetite

When I was fourteen years old, a friend came to my house with his hard drive in hand. He wanted to show me his games, a CD-ROM was not enough, and that was a time before external hard drives. Taking his hard drive with him was his solution to the problem. I felt like taking my hard drive with me as it felt so commendable in my head. He taught me how to assemble and disassemble a computer, how to configure my hard drive as a secondary drive, and many other things. Months later, someone from my mother's church needed help putting together a computer in his office. She didn't know who to call for help, so a neighbor told her to talk to the "little nerd" down the street. It was the first time someone had hired me for something I learned through gaming. Fortunately it wouldn't be the last either, certain occasions arose when I needed them the most.

Computer games and my new life

After 4 years of studying international relations, I learned that politics was not for me, limiting my job options to being an international business analyst. Although this may seem very elegant, it was not a very technical job. Good English was required, but not 4 years of university. It was office work that killed the soul and paid little more than minimum wage. Even educating English was better than that. This situation prompted me to look for a job in English schools and I finally got one. Everything was going well until the time when the upper management of the school replaced me with someone less expensive. I had just signed a lease for a couple of years. The English school promised me job security, but they soon fired me. My savings were enough to last me a month eating once a day. Overwhelmed, sending copies of my CV to hundreds and hundreds of companies and ready to admit anything, I found myself in the world of the freelancer.

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Content writing

The job search led me to a site that promised concerts. He helped me find work here and there. In general, specialists do better than generalists in the business game. However, the independent world rewards players of all trades, at least for a while. Some people needed translators, others needed music for their videos, and a geek site hired me to write about the games. The pay was low, but I was impressed that someone paid for my thoughts on hardware, computer games, and geek culture. Unfortunately, independent centers are usually a race to the bottom. Most of the time, it's just a matter of time until a new person accepts offers for less money. Not having a specialization saved me money in the beginning, but also made me easily tradeable. To make matters worse, I didn't know of any good places to find a job.

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game support

There was not a penny in my wallet when this Fb post appeared on my timeline. A company was looking for game support agents. While it wasn't a glamorous job, it couldn't be demanding. Interestingly, the fact that they were paid in US dollars made the salary more than double what she earned as a teacher. There were grammar tests, pattern recognition tests, knowledge tests and lastly an interview. I don't know many computer gamers whose first instinct is user support when a game isn't working, which must be why most of the people they hired were computer gamers. The company wanted agents who could figure out why a game wasn't working. They also required the agents to find a solution themselves. Something that came naturally to me has turned into a valuable skill. He also let me get the highest salary I received at that time. I went from eating once a day to comfortably ordering food, paying my bills and occasionally buying video games. The company expected agents to resolve an issue every 8 minutes. Achieving this goal was not difficult enough, but it was boring to sustain it for 8 hours. As a solution, I started developing mail fractions and assigning macros to them. The introduction of an email would be ready after 2 clicks. Certain command lines would give me the body of the message with a suggested solution. After that, I would write a short, slightly adapted paragraph in conclusion. This is how I turned my job into a game of finding patterns, hitting the right keys, and moving on to the next challenge.

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Personal manager

Sometimes there were a limited number of tickets to solve in a day. We were allowed to spend the remaining hours playing when we did. It was the time when I finished twice as many tickets as everyone else - I wanted to kick back and play. The management people noticed my speed. I was encouraged to apply for a workforce management position. It soon became very clear why speed was important in this new position. I didn't expect to play an RTS game during work hours, but this was exactly how I felt. The job was to monitor what others were doing and redirect them to increase productivity. I had to let them know if they needed to do anything else, take sick leave, coordinate logistics with team leads, and find on-the-fly solutions to support-side issues. I felt like I had dozens of units in Starcraft. From time to time he also had to deal with security issues. It wasn't uncommon to see an agent encounter password issues, especially when it came to Microsoft Teams. After getting a second monitor, this job became a much easier task than managing Zerg units. In my Starcraft 2 days, offering a cyclical system where I could check my units, structures, and resources put me in the most competitive league in this game. By assigning units and structures to shortcuts, I was able to cycle through specific keys repeatedly to verify them. It was a reliable way of knowing what to do next, especially when something was distracting me. This same system helped me manage two hundred employees, it worked like a charm.

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game reporter

Being a manager wasn't too difficult. It was still a lot of work. This is the type of activity that ends up weighing on you. It wasn't fun to be constantly worried and stressed. Unit management in strategy games was difficult, but company money was not on the line. Going from steady employment to self-employment was a leap of faith. It's hard to keep going, considering my native language is Portuguese, but I'm making it work one way or another. Now I have time to work with pixel art from time to time. I'm even developing my own game, which is a dream come true. Who knows what would have happened to me if it hadn't been for my geeky nature and PC gaming. Most likely I'll be miserable, have problems, and eat once a day, or worse. It was a long journey and it's not over yet, but now I'm in a better place.

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The Many Skills PC Games Teach

Thinking back to my first paid job, building a computer was probably the first thing I learned while gaming on my PC. I just wanted to show my friends some games and emulators I have which let me learn a bit more about computers. However, this is far from the only thing PC gaming has taught me.

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speak a foreign language

I am from brazil. Translated games were pretty rare 20 years ago. Therefore, video games have helped me develop a strong vocabulary. As a result, learning more words has become easier over time. It was very helpful when I was 18 and needed money. The kids in my neighborhood needed English lessons so they wouldn't fail in school and not want to choose between paying for food or school fees. While that wasn't the reason I started learning English, the game improved my fluency in the language. Electronic RPGs, as we called them back then, were my favorite type of PC game. They had a lot of dialogue, weird words, and good punctuation. I absorbed a lot without even realizing it. Being a gamer also helped me connect with my students, even though they were, on average, four years younger than me. Most of them loved video games, and I used them to keep them interested in my lessons.

Resource management and optimization

Teaching English to children has long been my only source of income. Unfortunately, that was not enough. In an instant, I had to take all the work I could find. Other than "can you help me get my printer working?" “It's kind of a job, I couldn't find anything else that paid me better, so I had to get creative. Resource management and optimization are second nature to real-time strategy players. Going from wood and meat in Age of Empires to money and food in real life felt natural. Thinking the same way you would play a strategy game, it was easy to identify the worst problems in my national economy. Buying cheaper brands, turning off the radio and other little things didn't seem like much. However, I was wrong. It all added up in the end. Every zerg player knows that resource management makes the difference between a successful zergling run and failure. Spending less and saving more allowed me to pay my expenses. It was also crucial to help my mother pay the rent.

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Multitasking

Another thing that RTS gamers are known for is multitasking. I'm not sure exactly when this happened to me, but Starcraft wired my brain to think about time management frequently. Wasting time became something he continually fought against. Even waiting for my coffee to be ready annoys me if I have tasks to do. I have to do the dishes, take out the trash, or whatever makes me feel like I'm managing my time effectively. It wasn't then, but there are plenty of apps that can help with that today. I used to take six buses a day, two to each place: work, university, and finally home. Previously, going from one place to another took more than an hour, plenty of time for reading and doing homework.

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