During grad school, I spent my weekends helping out at a friend’s game shop. The shop hosted the Pokemon League and held a weekly tournament, which meant there were a lot of tweens and teens in the shop. My friend was often handling sales and doing orders and to say the other owner wasn’t good with kids would be a gross understatement, so I ran League and the tournament and my friend did all the official paperwork for it.
Watching the kids between games and tournament rounds was interesting. They would swap strategy tips and help out confused newcomers. The more experienced kids would take on a trainer or mentoring role, adopting the new kid and showing them how to best use their cards or how to combine their cards. They would help them navigate the League procedures. The newcomer was quickly settled in, and the kids were helping each other become better players.
Sometimes, the kids would trade cards. They’d work together to find a comparable trade that would make both parties happy. Sometimes, they’d come borrow a trade magazine to check and make sure they had a fair trade going. When a dispute came up, they worked it out themselves or asked a third kid to help them resolve it. They only brought it to the owners if they absolutely couldn’t work it out on their own.
A couple of years after I left, these same kids were working together to set up in-store leagues and tournaments for other TCGs, continuing to mentor new kids in as they showed up. We were pretty proud of them.
People frown on the obsessiveness that can come from gaming, especially TCGs and miniature gaming, but they’re missing the benefits these kids get from engaging in them. They learn to share their knowledge. They learn how to help out someone else, selflessly in most cases. They learn how to resolve their own disagreements. They learn how to negotiate with an eye toward win-win results. They learn how to interact with each other, and they learn what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in interacting with someone else.
Gaming develops a wide range of skills, which helps younger gamers develop into adults who can better handle the world around them.
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