Written by Jonathan Kimak

#6 Hand-eye Coordination

Hand-eye coordination is the ability to use your eyes to guide the movement of your hands. This is done when you’re playing a game, looking at the screen and moving your character without looking at your joystick.

Learning hand-eye coordination enables you to perform tasks like reading music while playing an instrument, playing almost any real life sport and driving a car while fidgeting with the radio without crashing into a pole.

Is that a divot or a small dog?

Having good hand-eye coordination is good but it helps if you have decent health, reflexes and motor skills. Otherwise no matter how in tune you are with the ball headed your way, you will never hit or catch it with anything but your face.

The added bonus of hand-eye coordination is that it helps kids convince their parents to buy them games. The thought of their kid one day taking this skill out into the real world makes parents easy targets for shelling out $50 regularly so that their little athlete can train indoors where it’s safe.

#5 Business Skills

The dress code for today is gamer casual

With the downfall of the economy and numerous CEOs going to jail or the morgue there’s a lot of openings for people with business skills.

Anyone who’s played real time strategy games should be picked for a position ahead of someone who spent four years in business school learning how to be out of touch with reality.

A typical strategy to conquer the protoss or any other race in Starcraft (and eventually Starcraft 2) is to outmine them. The better you are at managing your resources(money), the better you’ll do against everyone else.

So to start you learn to hire a few interns(Probes/Drones/SCVS) and use them to bring in money on a regular basis. Then once you have some cashflow you hire some recruits(marines) and go scouting for other areas that have money for the taking. Then you expand to a new, richer area before all the resources in your first area dry up.

You use your forces’ strengths against your opponents weaknesses and charge the way onto victory (3 mansions and a super model wife).

#4 Physics Skills

Many games are starting to use real-world physics. Wind velocities are needed for snipers, gun recoil must be accounted for and correct angles are needed for bouncing a grenade off a wall into another room without blowing yourself up.

With your knowledge of physics you can make your next snowball fight extra devastating as you throw a snowball seemingly off course into a roof, causing 5 pounds of snow to come crashing onto your little brother as he laughs and says “Missed me.”

It can also help you with your actual physics homework by letting you “work out your problem” using some NPCs as target practice.

#3 Typing

Typing is an extremely useful skill and a high WPM looks good on a resume for any job. It used to be that to learn typing you would have to take a course on it or use software like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing where you would spend hours honing your skills through boring exercises typing nonsensical phrases.

If you play games then you’re already a typing expert. Most games have hotkeys, keys that you can press instead of mousing over a section of the screen. In game this saves precious seconds. But to make sure that you throw a grenade instead of jumping you have to know each hotkey and be able to press it as fast as possible. Eventually you know where each and every letter is on a keyboard. While another guy is clicking on the build icon and then the factory button you went pressed b(uild)-> f(actory) and are already 30 seconds ahead of him in the game.

You also learn to type from an in-game chat system. You have to be fast to tell a team mate to watch out. If you take to long to type it out then you’re stuck until you finish making yourself an easy target for the enemy to line up a headshot and crouch over your dead body, teabagging your corpse.

Mavis Beacon: Tea bagging free since ’93

If a typing teacher were ever to teabag the slowest typer in class you could be garaunteed two things.

1) The teacher would be fired

2) The student would become the world’s fastest typer

#2 Teamwork and Leadership

You’ve probably heard the flawed view of gamers as anti-social miscreants. But that’s just bullshit from people who don’t know a green drop from a purple one.

MMORPGs and team FPS games teach more about teamwork than any weekend retreat where you fall back and your mates catch you ever will. You also won’t have to spend 3 hours discussing your feelings.

In a clan or a guild you can develop actual friendships and do raids not just for the gold but because it’s fun doing things with your friends. You also learn that you have a specific role to play in the group. The healers stay back and help while the tanks run in and draw fire. Each team member may have a different task but everyone is important to the group’s survival.

Far right guy’s task? Random photo captions.

You’ve learned through harsh experience that running past the team to show your mad skillz only results in your virtual death and the team shaking their heads.

If your clan leader is doing something stupid you learn how to show them a better way of doing things while not sounding like a usurping asswipe. This skill alone will help you out in any job where your boss is an idiot which, sadly, is a case in many of the entry level jobs.

#1 How to tune out Obnoxious people

It’s a given that in every type of game there are going to be jackasses. Some people act like idiots for fun, others do it because it’s a way to pass the time between bashing their heads into the wall.

The lesson in tuning out an online obnoxious, anger filled jackass that has a penis that goes from A to Z on a keyboard is usually learned by trial and error.

You’re in a game and someone calls you a noob, you call them fat. They call you noob again, you call them uncreative. They call you noob once again and you snap and go on a five minute obscenity-laced tirade. You get kicked from the game, they don’t and they wait for their next target.

No matter what you do you won’t beat a jackass in a war of words. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

Pictured: The maturity level of the average teenage gamer.

So, after a lot of grief you realize that ignoring them robs them of their power and you tune them out and don’t take anything they say personally.

You take this into the world and become the guy everyone calls laid back and easy going. Nothing phases you. You take the punishment and ignore it and eventually the jackass at work goes on to bug someone else. You look cooler, get promoted more often and get married to a cheerleader.

Well, maybe not all that. But at the very least you become less stressed about any insults thrown your way.