Senses of direction.

Priorities:

I am back into minecraft. Have been for a few weeks. Between my last post and now, I got a new monitor and got back into StarCraft 2 and Battlefield 3.

Virtually virtual:

In StarCraft I played some ranked matches (Bronze ladder 1v1 and Gold 4v4) and am working on the campaign on brutal difficulty.

In Battlefield I got to the colonel rank (45) and stopped playing.

Now I am back into minecraft, specifically playing hardcore mode single player, playing normal single player with my wife when I can get her to play with me, and playing on the Unlimited Craft server. I will talk more about this in my next post.

I want to get skyrim because I have heard A LOT of hype about it. Better give it a try. Just a matter of money now.

My wife is playing dragon age 2 and a little minecraft with me. :)

Thoughtful gab:

Ok so I have an interesting story for today's gab, about direction.

I was just talking with my wife the other day while she was driving us in a area of town that we weren't familiar with, about how good my sense of direction is. Because during the drive, she managed to lose her sense of direction a few times.

For example, we were going East and she pulled into a gas station to get gas. We left the gas station and she turned out a different driveway and starting going North. She was completely unaware that she was going a different direction than before. It was obvious to me so I gave her a minuet to see if she would notice then told her the error. Similar instances happened 2 other times that same trip.

It just seems no matter where we drive, how many turns we make, or how unfamiliar the layout is, I usually know which way we came from, which way we were going, and which way is N.S.E.W. I don't need to look around a lot or check where the sun is, it just seems natural. I call it my internal compass. I never really questioned that it was anything besides a natural born sense of direction. Until today...

I was playing minecraft today and left my home to go chop wood in a nearby forest. I noticed that I had taken some turns and could not see my home anymore. But I remembered how I got to where I was, and even more importantly, where my home was from my position. I started thinking about how if my wife or parents would have done the same thing, they would be turned around and lost in the forest.

Now I have played many video games, for a long time. A lot of those games have minimaps and often you will need to backtrack. In an RPG you learn the layout because you travel back and forth often, while questing. In first person shooters you have to learn the map quickly so you know where the strategic points are, learning the layout as fast as possible drastically increases your odds of pwning a newb that has no idea where he is going. This "learning" of the maps and direction has become second nature, I don't need to activity memorize what is where, it just comes naturally and instantly.

So my theory is that this video game direction training has become a real world ability. Like a map on Battlefield 3 or Old Republic, in real life I am keeping track of my N.S.E.W. direction and the path I came from without consciously thinking about it. I am learning the layout automatically because I am so used to doing the same in video games.

Could this be another way video games benefit real life? Now of course I have no evidence that supports this. Just a coincidence and a simple theory really, but who knows. It might just be a natural sense of direction and not video game teachings, but It's an interesting thought none the less.