Every person who’s played video games has been told by someone who doesn't that we're wasting our time and to every one of those people, we can say that there’s plenty to learn from games and the people who play them. From social influence to economics, systems built into virtual worlds are based off of and have an affect on real life. Yair Ben-Dor has more.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 Every person who's played video games has been told by someone who doesn't
00:04 that we're wasting our time and to every one of those people we can say that
00:08 there's plenty to learn from games and the people who play them. From social
00:12 influence to economics, systems built into virtual worlds are based off of and
00:17 have an effect on real life. Video game researcher Dmitry Williams uses games as
00:22 a tool to study real-world behavior, discovering that people often attach
00:27 similar value and emotion to in-game money as they do to real-world money.
00:31 Like in Destiny 2 which utilizes virtual currencies, prompting players to consider
00:37 their worth and economic implications. Games like World of Tanks enable
00:42 researchers to explore how virtual purchases and player interactions
00:46 influence each other. "We were able to look at when this player buys a virtual
00:51 tank, do their friends then buy the virtual tank?" Williams said in an
00:55 interview with Marketplace. "If they play more, do their friends play more?" And so
00:59 we could find who the influences are in their systems. These virtual worlds offer
01:05 educational opportunities and some students make money for tuition by
01:09 streaming themselves playing video games, indicating that gaming has become a
01:14 source of financial knowledge for younger generations. So the next time
01:18 someone tells you you're wasting your time, you can tell them that the real
01:22 in-game currency is knowledge.