video games - a new way to play

With anything, there is a darkside to it. Yes, video games can be dehumanizing, promote violence and promote "numbness" to life. Life is boring compared to a video game. Questions about people wanting to feel again and to feel alive in their life could be caused by playing video games because the person becomes so detached to reality and over stimulated that "real life" is dull and boring.

So I am focusing on the lightside of video games. there are a lot of reports and ted talks talking about how video games benefit us.

With this thread, I am relating to how I am using video games in my jedi training to increase my emotional stability and calm under pressure. Where else can I challenge these things in a safe controlled environment that has little/few consequences.

For those who are trying this out, how is it going for you?

Locksley wrote: Just going to say, there is a reason why military use of videos games as training options have been explored.... reduction of stress, learning focus, reduction of empathy and fear responses... all that.

I've gone through a "Video game" style combat training. It was really cool! Except people don't 'die' when you shoot them because it's a video so they didn't fall over until later, but it was far from reducing empathy.

We were provided with a minimum background
"You are a part of a strike team approaching a building of a suspected terrorist" "You are manning a checkpoint"

You see a video of the event and the instructor can scale the event to his liking. The strike team can charge in the room and find local nationals with crates of food and all proper paperwork, or we surprised the local nationals in the middle of bomb building and they surrender (or they reach for weapons). OR they have a bomb built and they are threatening us with a detonator.

We have to follow all the proper procedures. And if we use our weapons where the system doesn't think we should, the program will freeze and we talk through with the instructor why we discharged our weapon. The instructor will then play the rest of the video to show what would continue to happen.

Then the system will go through the scene again, and pause for a few seconds at every shot so we can see how accurate we were, who shot friendlies, who fired early, who fired at those they were suppose to.

The local national who approached the checkpoint with a van loaded with AK47s starts speaking quickly in Arabic and brandishing one of the weapons in the air. Is he doing it aggressively? No, he's just trying to cash in on an offer of the US to buy AK47s at any checkpoint. (I didn't see the ones where that one was scaled up)

I felt it was the opposite of reducing empathy.

Scène : UIUC students' flat in Champaign, Illinois ; about July 1993 or so ...

I'm sitting on the floor in playing Tetris. The colours are lovely ...

My friend walks in and watches me calmly sitting there, turning and moving virtual pieces, letting them fall ... but, letting them pile up and close the screen. My friend says - "You're not very good at that."

My response : "I'm not trying to be good ..."

Yes, I've known about this upaya for a little while.

Tetric was one of the first games that taught me this. I feel there is a lot spiritual lessons to be learned from tetric.

One of them that I learned is the better I get at handling the "sh....t" life piles up on me, the more "sh....t" live piles up on me. An other way to put it, life only gives you what you can actually handle...

I learned how to remain calm and find the space between the pieces coming down. In the speed of the game, I found the slowness to pause. If you want to go fast - slow down.

What other lessons have people learned from games that would be good for a Jedi to know?

I love Tetris!