I was reading some article the other day about the youth of today being unprepared move into tech roles and my mind wandered to thinking about how I learned about tech/computing. And I started to think about all the stuff I've learned directly or indirectly from PC gaming. It's actually quite a bit:
- The main reason for using a PC when I was a kid was for playing games, but this naturally led to me learning how to use the PC in general
- Getting games to run was often quite tricky - bare-booting, messing about in config.sys/autoexec.bat etc to free up sufficient memory to play with both sound and a mouse driver, etc. This taught me a lot about some key principles of configuration, memory usage etc
- The reason I started dabbling with computer hardware was upgrading to play games. More RAM, 3dfx card etc. I then progressed to building my own PCs, installing the OS etc etc
- Gaming also drove my interest in the internet, going to a net cafe to download a game patch, visit a few gaming sites etc. This would have happened without gaming but it also taught me a fair bit about networking, optimising latency etc
- Through online gaming I've learned some of the basics of languages like German and Swedish due to speaking with and playing in teams with people from those nations. It also led to me visiting Sweden for the first time to participate in a LAN tournament