One of the first games I played on a computer was Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons.
As a quick introduction, the game starts after you select a character, who will have an affiliation to a naval nation - Portugal, England, Turkey, etc.
The main goal is to complete the character's story by completing story quests, that are typically advanced by gaining fame as an adventurer, pirate, or trader.
All characters are capable of being any of these "professions", though their main stories favour a particular type, and, consequently, each character will have skills and abilities that lean toward that type.
Nevertheless, you are free to buck the trend and fulfil your desire to become Captain Jack Sparrow or Hector Barbossa (you can even target other pirates), become a virtual millionaire by trading exotic goods (or run tried-and-tested local trade routes), even sate your wanderlust by exploring unknown parts of the world.
The maps were fairly accurate and remembering important ports' locations and information (like what goods were sold there and where the market was) helped kickstart my education on Geography.
I particularly enjoyed the free-play aspect of the game and still play it from time to time. As it was a DOS game, I've had to use an emulator - DOSBox - to play it on a modern PC.
If you've played this game before, or any like it, let me know!
Your Personality Based on Your Gaming Behaviours
How you play a game predicts how you handle real life.
Resources, exploration, formulating a plan, meeting objectives, identifying goals / milestones, keeping score, etc.
They have their parallels in real life and it's difficult to override your tendencies to do things a certain way.
For example, if you tend to think before you leap, you are less likely to do YOLO things in-game.
If you are an explorer type, you are more likely to go off the beaten path and look for side quests and interesting locations in a game.
If you like to keep updated and current when it comes to consumer goods and electronics, you are more likely to spend your in-game currency as soon as you get enough to acquire that shiny new weapon / armor.
This isn't to say that watching you play a game will allow me to have a complete picture of who you are.
Because context, companions, and frame of mind have to be taken into consideration as well.
But it can give a rough idea of your likes, dislikes, and tendencies. And that's always useful if we have to face off or interact in the virtual world.
Game Design and Making is Much More Than the End Product
I'm currently delving into a series of videos on game design and making.
Not because I intend to join the game-making community (though I'll never rule this out), but because I've been an avid gamer all my life, and I'm always interested in finding new angles and ways to make my lessons more interesting.
To get this out of the way, I think that the word "gamification" has become a grotesquely-overused buzzword that has lost its soul.
And, based on what I've witnessed so far, a lot of "game design" workshops run in local schools are just programming workshops with a gaming front cover.
The principles of making a game interesting, engaging, and fun seem secondary to producing some sort of rudimentary templated game on some standard platform.
Of course, one could argue that the time allocated is too short to produce a fully-fledged game, but then, why are there never board games, card games, or even sport-based games produced by the students in these workshops?
As huge an industry as video and mobile games is, not every game has to be digital.
I have no issue with teaching students programming and platform use, but if that's the goal of the programme, call a spade a spade and say that it's a programming workshop.
Game design and making is much more than just that.
My First Experience in a Part-Time Job Wasn't Great, But it Helped Me Discover What I Wanted and Didn't Want
Having always been a bit different (some say VERY), I naturally gravitated towards the self-employed/freelance/entrepreneur world.
Once I found it, of course.
My first foray into the working world was as a part-time admin assistant in the F&B department of a local country club. It was a holiday job, just before I started studying in Temasek Polytechnic (Biotechnology!)
The job came through an introduction, so I got it pretty easily. And because there were 6 months between getting my O level results and the start of my polytechnic course, I had plenty of time.
I found soon that I likely wasn't entirely needed, because most of the tasks were straightforward and I finished them in short order, thus ending up with a lot of downtime.
One of the tasks was supposed to take over a week, but I got it done in 2 days.
Unfortunately, being in an office environment at a low ranking job, and partly because I was introduced into it, I couldn't look like I had nothing to do even though I really had nothing to do.
This was extraordinarily hard.
I couldn't sit around reading, and there were no modern mobile phones with ready Internet access. The computers here weren't exactly very fast and there just wasn't that much on the Internet in those days anyway.
Within a couple weeks, I was completely bored. I didn't have the autonomy to spend downtime the way I wanted to, and I didn't have anything challenging or interesting to do.
I left after 2 months to preserve my sanity.
I am thankful to the person who got me the job, because I did learn a number of things, and it gave me a number of stories to tell since then.
It also taught me that I needed to find work that I could pour myself into and that I really couldn't stand tedium.
Also, I'm thankful to the person because I earned enough to go LAN gaming every day for the next 4 months (If you remember when this was a huge thing, you're likely of a similar age to me. :p ) before my poly course started.
Yes, I was a gamer. And through gaming, I learned a lot of very useful principles for designing learning programmes (again, a post for another time).
If I could go back in time, I don't think I would have changed this bit of my past, boring though it was. I feel that it had great formative value.