Expertise

Gaming is an impossibly time-consuming habit.  I often wonder what I'd do with all the time I spend on it in some alternate universe where I wasn't so heavily into it. It only gets worse as more and more "must-play" games that take 40-60 hours to finish come out, too. You went to 80 movies last year to try and made sure you saw everything really unmissable, hardcore movie fan? Well done, you saw 80 different pieces of work over the same length of time I've spent so far playing Skyrim, which I haven't even come close to finishing yet. Urgh. Now companies are increasingly making more and more games designed to basically never finish at all, and what's worse, at least three of them look amazing. How can you have more than one never-ending game in your life? It feels like I'm going to have to hire someone to play them for me to keep up.

The sad thing is, by the whole "10,000 hours" metric, you should at least theoretically be a 12th-dan master in something after years of  spending all this time on your hobby, right? But nooooo – each game changes the precise nature of what you're doing, so you don't even get 10,000-hour-level-expert at anything. If you pull the scope out a bit though, theoretically perhaps me – and several million other people – are at this point world-class experts at pushing small coloured buttons with our thumbs. It's hard to tell, because it's not something that gets tested in other areas of life.

I remember the only time I realised gaming had taught me a transferrable skill  pretty vividly. In my early uni days, the UCSA had a Time Out, and my A bursary money basically went into Virtua Cop 2, a light gun shooting game. After enough practice, I could clock the game with one coin (and possibly still could). So I was definitely a world-class expert at Virtua Cop 2 – great, very useful – but then I happened to find myself at a party one evening sitting in a kitchen holding a small squirt gun, and people were blowing small bubbles all around the room – and I could idly take out each bubble very rapidly in a single shot from the squirt gun with deadly precision, to the point where it was actually quite impressive to other people (look, they were drunk too, so that helped). I suddenly realised Virtua Cop 2 hadn't only made me good at Virtua Cop 2 – it had made me good at the skill of shooting small, moving targets that were one or two metres away from me. Yes! Now that's useful, if you're a, um, I dunno, bee hunter?

It's no use trying to tap this by making games that teach useful skills though, because no-one will want to play them. We need to flip that on its head and instead come up with solutions to the world's problems that are executed through pushing coloured buttons with your thumbs. And there's wiggle room here, because it doesn't even need to be slow or easy pushing! 10,000 hours, baby. Even if the combinations are quite difficult, we have an expert workforce several million strong just waiting to step up to the challenge. Need someone to push down, A, A, Y, X, up to solve world hunger? Man, I can nail that for you.

Get on it, science.