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Guest post: "Video games taught me how to treat people"

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KiranMumsnet · 01/06/2016 16:39

I was that child who excitedly came in to school with books to show to the other children. I was the child full of Star Trek quotes who slowly learned that caring about things wasn't cool, that reading was supposed to be a chore. Gradually, school taught me that enthusiasm can make you a target. In a school with just 150 students, any difference was singled out. I was ridiculed for being invested in books and work. In an effort to lessen the bullying, I tried toeing the line, suppressing the things that made me me, but nothing worked. I was alone.

My refuge came in the form of video games - I discovered role-playing games with plots and worlds as intricate as any in a library, like novels rendered in pixels and code. Most importantly, however, they let me in. The games were like incomplete stories, needing my skills and passion to bring each chapter to life.

Games lessened the sting of loneliness, providing the friends that the bullies denied me. When everyone else in my life told me I was fundamentally wrong, unnecessary and unneeded, I had well-written and complex characters to keep me company, characters that needed me for their survival.

Many games are built around the idea of a morality system, offering a single goal that can be achieved through different strategies. In most, the darkest path is also the easiest – don't deviate from your path, don't stop to help others, don't expend extra effort.

It might take a long time for the people who tormented me to understand what they did. This world, after all, is not so neat and binary as a simulated one. Consequences can happen out-of-sight, if they happen at all, and what's out-of-sight is easy to ignore. I wonder have the people who bullied me rationalised it in their head. It was just a bit of fun. Many probably don’t think about it at all.

I don't have that luxury. I live with the consequences of how they treated me every day – the anxiety, the mistrust, the fear that people will turn on me at any moment. Things are better than they were. I write and so I get to do what I love, and there's a great comfort in thinking that sharing my experiences might help others.

That consideration, that knowledge of cause-and-effect came from gaming. Cut a moral corner here and watch potential allies view you with suspicion. Act recklessly in the early stages of a campaign, and find yourself bereft of resources in the final battle. Sometimes the consequences were obvious – it's hard to argue with a GAME OVER screen – and sometimes they arrived hidden in backstory, or simply as a bad taste in your mouth when you realise things could have gone a better way.

These experiences had a profound effect on me as a child. Admittedly, the games I played were written systems that may never approach the complexity of human interaction. But they showed me that your actions mean something to those beyond yourself. I learned how to treat real people from interacting with fictional ones. There are worse ways.

After university, I returned as a teacher to the school in which I had been bullied. My heart still hammers out of time when I think of that first day, that first classroom and thirty pairs of waiting, judging eyes. I went back not just as an exorcism of my fears, but to try and create an atmosphere where young people felt they had permission to care about what they were learning, where they felt listened to in the way my 13-year-old self hadn't.

Classrooms are a fantastic testing ground, each one a different combination of personalities, ambitions and fears that young people often hide because they're afraid to stand out or be different, when it's that difference that makes them who they are.

When I speak to young people, I look for the zeal that they're trying to hide. It might not be writing. It might be coding, or taking cars apart, or running or boxing or video games. I let them see they have permission to care, and I listen to what they care about. It doesn't always work. But for young people, being told to care is a beginning. It's a start. And everyone starts somewhere.

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Meeep · 02/06/2016 11:28

I play a lot of games. I've never found one with a plot as intricate as you'd find in any library.

You clearly need to read more books.