A couple of years back, while visiting with family over Thanksgiving, my cousins and siblings and I started playing the card game we call King Peasant (though it’s also called a lot of other things around the world).
The Table of Contents
How a Card Game Taught Me the Consequences of Rule-Breaking
The premise is that the game models a political structure where the people on top stay on top and the people on bottom stay on bottom because at the beginning of each round, the lowest people have to give their top 1–3 cards to the top people, ensuring that the top people have better hands.
I’d been on the bottom for nearly the whole game, so I decided to see if I could model another aspect of politics and start a revolution. I successfully got all the bottom people plus the middle, neutral person to join my revolution and go on strike until the people at the top agreed to negotiate the rules with us to make the card-stealing mechanic less brutal on the bottom.
For me, it was hilarious to expand the political model in this way. For my two sisters who were at the top, one of whom had just reached the top after slowly clawing her way up from the bottom—this was not funny.
They were both legitimately pissed at me, not just during the game, but afterward, and talking about King Peasant with them remains a bad idea to this day.
The Biggest Life Lessons I’ve Learned from Video Games
What Competitive NES Games Taught Me About Winning and Losing
Video games have made me a better-socialized person. Some of my best life lessons about sharing as a kid came while playing multiplayer video games on the NES.
Split-screen co-op was rare in those 8-bit days (aside from Spy Vs Spy and Xenophobe), so most multiplayer games were alternating play, same-screen co-op, or same-screen competitive. Each of those multiplayer styles provides a venue for different socialization skills.
Competitive video games like Rampage, Tecmo Bowl, and WWF Wrestlemania were a good opportunity to learn how to win and lose without being a jerk. If you were a jerk, people wanted to play with you less.
I didn’t get an NES until midway through 1988, so if I wanted to play before that, I had a great incentive to be someone who wasn’t annoying to play with.
Co-op Games: Learning Teamwork with Contra and TMNT
Co-op games like Contra and Super C, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, and
the Ikari Warriors series—particularly the single-screen variety common in the 8-bit era, where one person’s progression could accidentally kill the other player—required cooperation.
You had to be aware of how what you did affected your partner and the overall strategy, and not always put yourself first.
Taking Turns: Patience and Sharing in Alternating Play Games
Alternating multiplayer games like the Super Mario Bros series, Double Dragon (the NES version), Paperboy, and the very strange Q*Bert, taught patience and sharing since there was a fair amount of waiting and watching the other player(s). Actively rooting for their failure also tended to have negative social consequences (usually).
Why Peer Consequences in Games Matter More Than Adult Supervision
Now all of these peer socialization lessons are things that kids get outside of multiplayer video games, of course, in activities like team sports or school playgrounds. But unlike those settings, video game sessions tended (for me, anyway) to be relatively unsupervised by adults.
So unless peer interactions got really out of hand, there was no adult stepping in. I didn’t learn adult consequences for misbehavior—I learned peer consequences, which is a totally different and important thing for a kid to understand.
Are Multiplayer Games Still Good Socializers Today?
I think there’s a lot to be learned from video games throughout life. But if I’m trying to pinpoint the biggest life lessons I’ve learned from video games, I have to go back to these early socializing experiences.
What do you think? Are multiplayer video games still effective socializers? Is it significantly different today now that so much of multiplayer is online (and trolling has fewer consequences)?
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Authoritative Sources on Video Game Social Learning
- Lifewire – Video Games & Social Values
- IGN – The 5 Ways Society Crumbles (According to Video Games)
- Harvard GSE – Can Video Games Help Kids Learn?
Frequently Asked Questions:
What life lessons can you learn from playing video games?
- Playing video games—especially retro multiplayer titles—can teach life lessons such as cooperation, patience, resilience, and social awareness.
- Classic games like Contra and Super Mario Bros helped kids learn to share, win gracefully, and play fair.
How do video games teach social skills?
- Multiplayer games create environments where players must cooperate, take turns, and resolve conflicts without adult supervision.
- This helps kids develop peer-based consequences for behavior, unlike adult-structured settings like sports or school.
Are retro games still relevant for learning?
- Yes. While modern games have shifted online, the core principles of teamwork, patience, and empathy learned through retro couch co-op games are still valuable in shaping behavior and decision-making.
