Three life lessons I learnt from playing MMORPGs.
Remember Runescape?
It was one of the first MMORPGs — and videogames in general — I’ve ever played.
It blew my tiny mind at that time. A whole world in my computer! With living breathing people trash talking me!
You probably know what an MMORPG is. But just in case, MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
It’s a genre of videogame simulating an entire — usually fantastical — online world that people around the world can role play in. All anyone have to do is to create an account and in-game avatar, and they can begin playing.
- Want to be a powerful knight and slay dragons? No problem.
- Want to be a wizard and set people on fire? Knock yourself out.
- Want to be a beautiful seductress and scam men out of real life money? Well, don’t do that.
Because I’m an adult with more important things to do, I’ve not touched any of them for over a decade.
But what stayed with me were the lessons I learnt playing them. And they were surprisingly useful to me even today.
So here’s three of them.
1. ‘I’m a newbie!’
A friend introduced Runscape to me.
He watched on like a proud father as I created my first avatar and plopped into the game world. He then took over the keyboard and spammed, ‘I’m a newbie!’, in the chat box.
Within minutes, people gave me random pieces of equipment to adorn my avatar with.
Cool trick. I would then go on to be an annoying spammer for most of my youth.
With enough spamming, I attracted experienced players to show me the ropes, telling me tips and tricks that would optimise my gaming experience.
Sometimes they would even form parties with me.
Forming a party just means forming a group, like the Fellowship of the Ring in Lord Of The Rings. When you form a party with other players, you can take on quests that may be too difficult for you.
Your main objective in these games was to make your avatar more powerful by gaining experience points to level up. And the best way to achieve it was to slay high level monsters or do difficult quests.
And slaying high level monsters and doing difficult quests were much easier with a party. The experience points were then shared with everyone on the team.
This made progression in the game faster since a party was much more powerful than a single player. And having high level players in your team expedited the process even more, because they made your team so much more powerful, trivialising every quests and monsters.
In most MMORPGs, there will be high level players that do nothing all day but help newbies. You just had to ask.
Not everyone will help you. But all you needed was one or two helpful players.
In real life, this means asking people more successful than you for help.
You could try to succeed by your lonesome. But if you are able to get someone more experienced on your side, you could halve the time and effort it will take you to achieve your goals.
2. Leverage existing assets.
If a high level player can give other newer players a leg up, why can’t they do it for themselves?
What do I mean by that?
It’s common for any one player to have a mix of high and low level avatars. And they would use the same trick of forming parties to level up their avatars fast. But this time, they formed parties among their own avatars.
And they were able to grow multiple avatars at a fraction of the time it would take, if they played the game as intended by the developers: Playing one avatar at a time.
In real life, it means leveraging your existing assets to grow other assets.
- It could be buying up new companies, leveraging on the financial strength of your current company.
- It could be using your popular social media accounts to promote your other smaller accounts.
- Or it could be expanding your social circle through your immediate friends and relatives.
There’s never enough time for everything we want to do. Leveraging is the secret time management technique no one told you.
3. Investing in Passive Skills
Whenever your avatar leveled up in these games, you also got to pick skills for them.
Skills made your avatar more powerful in specific ways. There were two kinds of skills. Active skills and Passive skills.
Active skills were usually some form of flashy special attack that made your avatar drastically more powerful in the short run. While Passive skills made your avatar more powerful permanently.
But the increase in power was minuscule. Boring.
Active skills sounded cool and exciting. So I’d put all my points in them.
But here’s something about Active skills. How powerful they were was directly related to how powerful your avatar was in it’s non-powered up state.
Meaning the more powerful your avatar was in a non-powered up state, the more powerful the Active skill would be. Vice versa.
You can already see the mistake I was making.
I chose the instant gratification of flashy graphics and short term power gain over investing in skills that would make my avatar much more powerful in the long run.
Like choosing steroids over regular weight lifting.
Passive skills — while boring — made my avatar stronger in its default non-powered up state.
Meanwhile, my friend — the one that introduced me to Runescape in the first place — would invest in Passive skills. And he would routinely beat my high level avatar with his lower level ones.
That’s how powerful Passive skills were.
In real life, Passive skills are your fundamentals. Once it’s yours, it’s always yours.
As long as your fundamentals are solid, you can tackle anything. You are never starting over from zero no matter how bad things may get.
Closing
In many ways, games mimic the real world — especially those that encourage social interaction. There are always knowledge to be found in them, if you know to look.
