Games are an important tool for many things. They provide a space for entertainment, creativity, and learning. Most importantly, games are a vehicle for the exercise of mastery. For competitive games this is especially true.
We’ve all started from somewhere; and if our games of choice mean anything to us, we can all remember how bad we used to be at them. We may also remember the feeling that fueled our pursuit in mastering the game. Humiliation, determination, anger, excitement, curiosity or obsession could have been the driving force. And here we are much later: perhaps not masters but certainly much better than before.
In pursuing mastery we learn even more useful things. Games are a microcosm, a reality within our own reality that in turn teaches us about the nature of the world around us. Mastery is the understanding of this tiny universe. As a beginner you are infantile. You have little control of your faculties. You need complex ideas broken down into digestible pieces. You need dogma, superstition, and rules of thumb: stand behind your minions, don’t jump, always punt on 4th. In the world of games growth is not compulsory, it’s a choice. You must choose to “git gud”. You must master control of your character, master the strategic language, and master learning. To many people this is a waste of time. Why take it so seriously? It’s just a game! I would contest that while your life isn’t on the line there is virtue in seeking digital (or tabletop) glory.
You learn to accept difficult truths.
You may learn that some moves, characters, cards, teams or weapons are worse than others. At times there may only be one or two dominant strategies as the game has evolved. To many people this may be frustrating. After all, you want to play the game the way YOU want to play it. No one likes feeling forced into playing a character or a deck that they hate. But you only get better if you push for victory, and in pushing for victory you have two options. For one, you can speak the common language of the meta and play the dominant strategy or otherwise, you can find a new angle of approach. While the latter is more satisfying to the ego the former is usually the right choice. After all the truth is in victory and that is a hard pill to swallow for the naive.
You learn to embrace struggle.
Mastering a game is a long journey but is thankfully shorter than mastering engineering or architecture. That doesn’t mean that becoming great at your game won’t take at least one year (maybe less if you’re familiar with the genre). Throughout that good diligent year you’ll notice slow and steady improvements in your game. Understanding the nature of personal improvement; that it is slow, arduous, and sometimes painful, is a universal understanding of growth. This struggle is how it will be when you decide to lose weight, learn surfing, or take up guitar. Mastering games employs this virtue.
You begin to see the game in everything.
When you understand the language of strategy you begin to hear it everywhere: in politics, economics, discussions of philosophy or human nature. Games, taken seriously, teach you about people. At a master level you can intuitively predict the actions your opponents will take based on environmental incentives. This is transferable wisdom that can be used to aid your understanding of other world issues and events.
In short games are not a waste of time. You only waste time when you aren’t gaining any wisdom from your practice. So I implore that even the most filthy of casual take a deep dive into the meta of their choice and see what new understanding they emerge with.