Motivation in many forms

What to write, what to write. I want to maintain my daily updates and yet, I don't want to be boring either. I'm certain no one needs to hear about my day at work, or what I had for breakfast, but there might be snippets of interesting gaming related occurrences if I really comb through my day. So here goes nothing.

I started out this morning with about 20 minutes of Gems of War during breakfast. (I've already sung it's praises in yesterday's post.) My current project is trying to save up enough for celestial armor without using real world money. It's slow going but it's better than the alternative. I consider myself lucky that I'm able to make up for y thriftiness with stubborn and targeted perseverance.

After that, I headed to work and did work things. You don't want to hear about that part. It was work, and work is dull. Except for the part where a co-worker and I have a long running routine of going out at lunch to hack Ingress portals. Well I'm sure you can guess what that's been replaced by lately. We caught tons of Pokémon today, and exchanged smiles with plenty of new faces that were out and about that were staring just as intently into their screens.

I swear we see three times as many people on our lunchtime walk as we did before Pokémon Go was available. I love how it's encouraging people to come back out of their insulated little shells even in the interest of playing an augmented reality game. Ingress did much the same for me even though it was never nearly as popular as the current craze. There are some that would scoff at this.

I've heard of  the disdain for 'gameification' first hand. Someone mentioned this to me and was actually upset at the concept of doing something only for the sake of a game. Oddly, this same person had no problem with the concept of an athlete training nonstop (and being paid millions of dollars) for the sake of a game. It's all a matter of perspective. No one looks down on a football player for making sacrifices for his sport, so I see no reason to begrudge a gamer for what fundamentally amounts to the same thing. I mean, I simply fail to see how the positive impact of any activity could be considered less positive because of the motivation behind it.

The motivation doesn't matter if the job gets done. Gaming can and should be a force for good. Extra Life is a prime example that. Things like rhythm games and AR games help our primarily sedentary society be a little more active. MMOs teach leadership skills and help you build friendships with people based on personality, instead of shallower traits. Games teach us. We hone our critical thinking and logic. We develop our reflexes and attention to detail. Anyone who maintains that nothing good comes of playing games just isn't paying attention.