More Than Mayhem: Grand Theft Auto’s Unexpected Lessons for Personal Growth
As you’ve probably gathered from reading my blog posts (or just knowing me), I’m a huge gamer. It is one of my favorite ways to spend time. With the combination of stories, characters, environment, and music/sounds, it offers an immersive experience that can keep me focused for the period of time I play.
Grand Theft Auto was one of the game changing games in middle school, going into high school. An open world game where you can do just about anything on such a large scale was very new game concept to the masses. And of course, it brought along with it the controversy of violence and its affect on children/society. For this post, I’ll just mention the positive take aways from this game, and pretty much an overview, for those who haven’t played and those who may need a refresher.
In each installment of the game, you control a character who starts as pretty much a nobody in an active city. You quickly get an introduction to a character that needs a favor, which leads you to your first job. As you complete these initial tasks, you’re introduced to various other characters, ranging from the subtle, to the highly significant. Some of these characters recognize how well you do carrying out tasks, while others rely more on your reputation/word of mouth from other reputable characters.
And as is typical in action/adventure games, your character gradually acquires new techniques, skills, and unlocks valuable items as the story progresses. These all become essential through the game as different tasks and areas call on different skills/items. And while you may not directly use one skill or item to carry out another, they do allow you to complete tasks that get you to those next opportunities.
So the 2 positive take aways from this game are examples of passive networking and skill expansion. Instead of just thinking about networking as something you need to do, and looking for “networking” events to attend, it can also be considered a secondary benefit of just carrying out tasks and being mindful of who you’re interacting with. Allowing others to leverage your skills sometimes comes with the benefit of a paycheck, as is almost always the case in GTA, but it also comes with building trust/a rapport with someone.
In addition to the networking opportunities, comes chances where you can add a little bit more responsibility to your plate, which gives you a chance to expand your skillset. In GTA San Andres, an instance of this is taking on the job of attending Pilot School. The jobs that lead up to meeting this character don’t have anything to do with Piloting, but they lead to you meeting the character that requires this in order for you to progress.
A more real life example I’ll give is my time where I was a QlikView consultant and that was the main development I ever did. I decided to work on a mobile game, which allowed a friend to be comfortable asking me to help him build an app he needed. This led to me A) Meeting a graphic designer and B) learning EmberJS, Python, and a small set of Amazon Web Services.
Grand Theft Auto is a very enjoyable game series that came with some controversy throughout its lifetime, but it’s story mode does offer some valuable life lessons that can help you on your journey.
