Let’s talk about something personal for a second. I have some pretty bad hand tremors. Actually, my motor skills are all sorts of screwed up. When I was a kid, I had a developmental disorder that made it so that I had a hard time coordinating the movements of my arms, hands, and fingers. It made me clumsy. I was prone to tripping and was generally a mess. In short, it wasn’t a good look.
A lot of the things that were recommended for me I just didn’t do. I mean, I was a kid. I was more interested in reading comics than going through nightly exercises to help my hands get better. Heck, as far as I was concerned, it was the world that had a problem with me, and I was just fine.
Enter video games. I had already played a few video games at this point, but nothing major. It was mostly Poker for my parents’ Intellivision. But I was a kid and all my other friends were getting this awesome thing called an NES. I would go over to my friends’ houses and play for hours. The eight-bit graphics were mind-blowing to my prepubescent self.
I tried my hand at playing the games and frankly, it hurt. My hands would cramp up and wouldn’t want to hold the controller the right way. That’s not just because of the boxy NES controller design. I couldn’t move my thumbs very quickly and I would routinely drop the controller over and over again.
But this was something I WANTED to do. I didn’t care much about squeezing a ball or tapping my hands on the table in a certain pattern. I wanted to beat Mario . I wanted to design crazy courses in Excite Bike. I wanted to shove insect repellant up Donkey Kong’s butt in Donkey Kong 3 . Games were kind of weird back then.
As I continued playing games, my hand eye coordination got better and better. Don’t get me wrong, to this day my handwriting is legible to no one including myself. But my fine motor skills continued to improve. I performed better on motor skill tests, and soon found that my hands didn’t hurt anymore when using the controller. Granted, it didn’t do anything for my legs and I still trip over my own two feet sometimes, but it served as a form of physical therapy that quite possibly made me capable of writing and using a computer today.
The point of this story is… well, there’s not much of a point, to be honest. I just wanted to show people the good that video games can do. Even today, games are being used as teaching tools, medical tools, and yes, even forms of therapy. There’s a lot more to our favorite pastime than just the pastime. Games have made a profound difference in many people’s lives, and I am one of them. Part of the reason I stick with games even today is because I want to see how they will change other people’s lives in the future.