If you like to play video games, you’re probably no stranger to your dad complaining about how they’re a waste of time. Today, video games are so commonplace that they appear in many different forms, from mobile apps to VR headsets to handheld consoles. Whether you are searching for the top games of the year or nostalgic classics from the ‘80s, the truth is that video games have not only made a huge impact on society in entertainment value but also in the skills they are able to impart. Here are some of the useful skills video games can help you to develop.

Problem Solving

Believe it or not, playing Zelda games can actually accomplish more than just exploring all of Hyrule. Puzzle games like Ubisoft games and basically all Zelda games train the brain to find creative solutions to complex problems. Research suggests that popular mainstream games such as Call of Duty, League of Legends, and StarCraft can help improve the gamers’ problem-solving skills, attention span, and hand-eye coordination.

Job Preparation

Developing hand-eye coordination skills, better attention span, and problem-solving skills can be advantageous in any workplace. Different jobs may require skills that games can teach such as spatial orientation, information gathering, and better reaction time to emergency situations. According to L3HARRIS, airlines and overland freight companies routinely use simulators to train their workforce. Commercial airline pilots are required to practice emergency procedures in flight simulators and are required to pass a simulator assessment every six months. In addition, technology such as augmented reality made popular by Pokémon Go has already made its way into the workplace of engineering, manufacturing, and production jobs.

Stay Fit

Many professionally competitive gamers have been warned that staying fit is essential to maintain their game skills and reaction speed. Just as there are games to cover many subjects, there are games that can help improve fitness. According to Axtion Tech, activity-based games such as Just Dance and Dance Dance Revolution can provide a great workout. In addition, virtual reality activity games such as boxing, fencing, and speed skating can also provide intensive exercise.

Gaming as a teen is not a useless hobby. More and more people are recognizing the positive attributes that can be developed in a healthy gamer. You’ve just got to make sure to balance gaming with other things in your life. Gone are the days when games and gamers belong at the nerdy table. Contrary to what your dad may think, they can actually be quite useful.

Battle Royale games are all the craze across the globe, ranging from Fortnite Battle Royale and PlayerUnknown’s Battleground. When it comes to PUBG, you do not want to be left out in showcasing your prowess, when every other gamer from the 30 million daily active users across the world is upping their game. The high number of active players makes winning a matter precise strategies and skills, without which you will always be lagging in the game.

Lucky for you, some experts have shared some of the tricks and hacks that help them get by, and you will need them in your journey to becoming a pro PUBG player. Here are five tactics to get you started on your road to becoming an epic PUBG player:

Adjust the graphics

Most gamers get quickly invested in getting the very best accessories to better their gaming experience, such as the opseat master series. But one other thing which can greatly boost your experience is better graphics, and one hack we heard which doesn’t involve buying anything is to increase the contrast so your enemies stand out much more. Then set it back to normal so you don’t get a headache when viewing normal content.

Study the map

This is a crucial step if you are only beginning. Studying the map allows you to figure out your way swiftly around the battleground while playing. Master all the crucial hotspots in a particular map, ranging from Erangel and Miramir to Sanhok and Vikendi.

Capitalize on the training ground

Figure 1 try out the guns

It may be a no brainer to you, but it is not to everyone. PUBG Mobile has a training mode feature that is very often overlooked by gamers. The feature allows you to try out all the guns, attachments, and other weapons. In the end, trying out the different weapons enable you to know what suits you best for better gameplay.

However, if you really want to do it like the experts, don’t just test the weapons at face-value. Consider the recoil patterns. For example, the AKM gun has a high damage rate but high recoil. By mastering the recoil patterns and the names of the guns, you already have a competitive advantage even before the game starts.

Land at hotspots that are away from the flight path

Now that you know your way around the maps, the next step is to identify a spot that has the prime resources but is slightly far from the flight path. The advantage with this trick is that you may end up having most of the loot for yourself. Even in the event of people showing up, you will have more advantage in fighting them off, assuming you chose the best weapons.

Don’t kill knocked out players immediately

When the game is going your way, do not let the excitement of the game get you making the wrong calls. Once you knock down a player, be hesitant about completely getting rid of them immediately. While that should be the end game, use the knocked out players as bait. A lot of the times, a knocked out gamer will ask for help from a teammate. When they come out, this is your opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. However, be keen lest they get sneaky on you and hide far away from your field-of-view.

Seek cover in terrain

As you may have noticed, the buildings are such an ideal spot to seek cover. With the perfect strategy, you can stay alive if you are in a building, more especially if you have covered the only entrance to the building. However, some risks come with that. All it takes is for someone to know you are there, and a well-placed grenade can end your gameplay instantly. For that reason, consider the terrain an ideal place for cover. A suitable terrain will give you a spot with excellent sightlines to keep a view of your enemies. Other than that, you have more escape options when you are on terrain than inside a building. Find a ridge, dip, or hill to hold you up for a while, before your next move.

While at it, consider hiding in bushes. It may look like a lame move, but hiding in bushes works surprisingly very well. However, you may want to take off any bright colored clothes you have before you hit the bushes.

Grab the highest level equipment

If you really want to win the PUBG game, then you must grab the highest level of equipment when you are looting untouched equipment. While that is a strategy, there is more you can do to have the best armor for the game. When you defeat a level three player, it can be challenging to know what to pick up and what to leave. A general rule applied by most PUBG experts is, ‘always pick the level three helmet.’ Even though it might be damaged, this helmet will always save you from a headshot with the M24 and is the only one that will do so.

Pick your battles wisely

You are aiming for many kills in one round, but the chances of that happening and you being alive in the end are usually very slim. The whole idea of the game is to be the last man standing. This means that if other players can help you get rid of some people, then you should let them. The best strategy is not to hide out and avoid picking fights altogether, but rather to pick battles you know you can win. Know which enemies to attack in clear sight, and which ones you should re-strategize before you attack.

Many people would love to earn a full-time living doing what they have a passion for. If you are a gamer you might have wondered how to make money making video games. Well, earlier this month CrazyGames launched a new Developer Portal that promises to share revenue with all contributors to its browser games platform.

Not only that, but they are running a contest which awards $2,000 to the best game submitted in the months of October and November! (ends November 30th). The winner will be chosen by a panel of game experts, rather than a voting popularity contest which can be manipulated (how many social media posts haven’t you seen where people beg for votes?)

Here’s how CrazyGames works for anyone wondering “Can I make money by making games?”

First, you need to know that CrazyGames has about 10 million users every month. That’s a lot of people who could play your game if its good enough. The developer portal tells you how many people play and the revenue you earned because of it. The company will pay you a portion of what they make on ads.

How to make a game they will accept?

CrazyGames takes any HTML5-based game, including Unity, Unreal and Phase games. You keep 100% of the rights to your game and can delete at any time.

All you need to upload is your game files and a screenshot!

How do I make money with my games?

As long as your game does not contain ads, or branding from another game portal, and it hasn’t been published elsewhere first, you are eligible for revenue. You can share it elsewhere after publishing on CrazyGames, like the App Store, Play Store, Steam, etc.

How much money can I make?

You can earn between $1.50 and 3 bucks per 1000 plays for each HTML5 browser game. You have to earn a certain amount of money (about $100 USD) before they pay out via Paypal.

What’s cool is that most games get featured on the first page for 48 hours to give you a fair shot at earning plays — and popular ones can stay even longer.

Hopefully this answers how to make money making video games for you aspiring developers out there!

Check out a sample game!

As an MMORPG enthusiast who enjoys peeking into human psyche, I’ve often found that MMOs are perhaps one of the greatest platforms for conducting experiments and observing the many personalities humans possess. Quite frequently, I’ve heard it suggested that MMOs harbor toxic environments, rife with trolls and bullies, especially in guild culture. In this article, I’d like to examine any truth to those statements, and whether MMOs are uniquely conducive to toxicity, or simply a medium of extending our true-life personalities into virtual worlds.

Multiplayer games provide an astounding look into sociodynamic behavior – players who are thousands of miles apart, bonding or dividing over common creeds and goals. For example, players in MMOs can form groups called “guilds”. The actual mechanic name may vary depending on the MMO — they’re called cabals in The Secret World, for example — but guild is the general term. Generally speaking, they’re simply a way for players to form permanent groups, and often revolve around common causes – related to gameplay or not. I’ll explore that latter scenario later in this article.

The size of guilds can range from a handful of players, to several thousand – the largest corporation in Eve Online has 11,880 members as of writing. Interestingly, online games didn’t have guilds in the early days, because there were too few players. The earliest online games, known as MUDs, did have them; but the concept was seen as just another differentiator, in the same way that idiosyncratic healing strategies or the presence of currency were. There weren’t friends lists: the games were so small that you knew everyone anyway.

Today, guilds serve to divide the player base into smaller organizations. However, it’s been posited that they may hinder game immersion – owing to drama, elitism, and a general level of toxicity. Because there are real people behind the screens, real life biases can and often crop up in these social environments. I’m not speaking simply of online bullying, though this is often a major contributor.

Take for example Houses in the online game Achaea. Because Achaea is highly role-playing enforced, the guilds revolve around in-game fantasy concepts, such as protectors of Nature, or evil knights in service to Lord Sartan. Players join these guilds to expand their character’s story, to take part in enhanced roleplay, to leave real life behind and engage in a fantasy world. Yet more often than not, players complain of elitism, bullying, and out-of-game communication channels where players gossip about each other’s personal lives, and then bring these biases into the game itself.

Now what’s truly fascinating is that in games without hardcoded methods of forming player-organizations, people do it anyways. Take a look at Agar.io – an extremely simple yet popular online game. It is fairly devoid of plot, storyline, or any sort of hardcoded mechanics that would reward player groups. The goal of the game is to grow your cell, represented on screen as a colored circle, by feeding on pellets and smaller players. It is a literal free-for-all, with no mechanics for player grouping.

Ironically, players found ways to divide themselves into teams – through online names or cell colors. In fact, Agar.io became a center of political advocacy during the 2015 Turkish elections. Players were naming themselves according to political affiliation, and grouping up to battle players on the opposing spectrum. This highlights an obvious, yet intrinsic value hardcoded into the instinct of mankind – the desire to form like-minded communities. As Plato suggests, unless human persons congregate in groups, they could not survive, or if they could survive, they could not go beyond a minimal, animal kind of existence.

It’s worthwhile remembering this when considering whether or not guilds in multiplayer games are responsible for toxic environments. This piece on MassivelyOP, titled “Dealing with Toxicity in MMO Communities”, reached out to game developers, asking how toxic behaviours could be minimized in MMO games. The majority of responses focused on different aspects of the root causes of toxic behavior – competitive gameplay, the anonymity of the internet, and ultimately human nature. The responses seemed to reach the same conclusion; that humans are inherently toxic towards one another, and only extreme community moderating can begin to solve the problem.

The idea of competitive gameplay as the root of toxicity is an interesting theory, however. Because competition is indeed ingrained into the very cores of evolution. Without competition, there would be very little reason to evolve as species – and while “peace on earth” may be a desirable dream for mankind, it’d make for extremely boring gameplay. In fact, real world history remembers the conquerors – the Genghis Khans, Alexanders, and Napoleons of the world. Were Genghis Khan an MMO player today, he would certainly be accused of “trolling” and “toxic attitude”, as he raped and pillaged his way across game servers, with his guild of Mongolians. And yet, isn’t that the point of MMO gameplay, to a degree?

I know I’ve seemingly veered off into a separate subject than the sociodynamics of MMO organizations, but perhaps not – because as long as we retain that “conqueror” gene, that basic human instinct to categorize ourselves into like-minded groups with the goal of expansion, organizations will always be an element of multiplayer games, hardcoded or not, for better or for worse.

Thus, I posit that MMOs are not uniquely conducive to toxic environments, because toxicity already exists all around us in the real world. It’s simply that it’s easier to notice toxicity in virtual worlds, and we expect someone, like the administrators, to do something about it. Because when MMOS are seen as an “escape” from the real world, yet simply offer a mirror reflection of the real world in virtual form, it’s a very real reminder of the harsh world we live in, and thus the point of playing these games as a form of escapism becomes severely moot.

Bio: Katie Green is a passionate video game millennial with a background in writing. Currently working at CrazyGames, one of the fastest growing browser game websites in the World.