Gaming is Good for Relationships

I have only occasionally mentioned that I'm a gamer. Although it wasn't until recently that I started to realize that gaming is good for relationships. When I say relationships I'm primarily thinking on a husband and wife level, but you can substitute for any relationship: father and son, best friends, siblings, and so on. If I ran one of those Fortune 500 companies part of my team-building exercises would include gaming. I've broken it down into a few points that, hopefully, make sense.

I just scared away 97% of my readers by posting this image.

You spend time together

This is an obvious one. Spending more time together is always a good idea if you're looking to bond more. One of my recent posts also mentioned that, dollar for dollar, gaming is very cost effective. So if you're looking to hang out with someone without breaking the bank gaming couldn't be better.

You have to work together

By working together in a game you get suggestions and ideas from your partner, you also give in the same capacity. From that standpoint you could say that gaming is a neutral ground to allow the both of you to become comfortable with the idea of working as a team. Once you have the ability for teamwork you're like an unstoppable force against anything else.

High fives are not optional.

It's like a fire drill for when something really bad happens

Fire drills are a common thing done on a regular basis in the hopes that, with enough practice, the actual event of a fire will be treated with as much calm as a mere fire drill.

Sometimes actual fires are started to prevent clam turning into apathy.

Playing a videogame can create an artificial sense of stress for which you have to interact with each other during. Can't defeat that boss? Stuck on a puzzle? Do you devolve into arguing with each other, having forgotten the problem in the first place? Or do you work together, trying each other's suggestions? Now imagine you and your partner with a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, you can't really walk away from that.

Nor can you really look up a walkthrough...oh wait,

You lose to your partner

Losing is just as important as winning. In most cases you can't win without someone else losing. Even lottery winnings is the total of a combined group of people losing their money at one time or another. If you won all the time it removes the challenge and negates the actual reward, but I digress.

Nobody likes to be wrong and no one likes to lose, even to their own partner. I've focused primarily on the idea of working together but sometimes it's good to play against each other. By losing you realize it's no big deal and, at the end of the day, that nothing has been lost between you.

If there's a blue shell though, that's grounds for divorce.

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If all caps is yelling, is this like whispering?