How Gaming Changed My Life
I am not talking about participating in E-sport tournament where you could win a couple of million dollars but simply from an everyday-gamer's perspective.
My childhood was tough, as I constantly felt inferior to my peers in terms of academics, due to dyslexia. I was studying harder than most people but I never gotten the grades I felt i deserved. Feeling inadequate, I found my source of relief and validation for my existence from playing games.
Gaming made me feel that I am in control of my life and it had allowed me to be someone else I'm not in real life. It's a form of escaping the reality and I felt great! I seek unique and unconventional ways to stay ahead of my peers in the games, strangely I was never interested in leveling or doing quests but i was awfully fascinated in the idea of finding loopholes and I was really good at it.
Here are some of the games I played Neopets, Runescape, Maplestory and World Of Warcraft. And I noticed from each of these games that I was constantly rich in-game.
One game in particular changed my life unexpectedly,it is called Friends for Sale. It is about a game where you can virtually "buy and sell" your friends to make money and it instantly struck me as a game that I would love.
My first step was to be highly valued, which means someone has to "buy" you in order for you to rise in value. It was a grind for me as I had to network within the game and hoping someone sees the value in me. No one really wanted to waste their cash on me at first. In fact people who bought me were quick to asked me to find a new buyer(owner) so they can make a profit out of me.
Then I decided to turn the table and changed my game plan. I wanted people to WANT to know me. So I started finding unique ways to make a lot of in-game money and it worked well. My "value" rose fast, my name got out and I was more connected than ever. People wanted to know me, team up with me because they saw the value I could deliver. The demand to buy me was insane.
What i learnt from here was that if you deliver value, people would see the value in you.
"If you deliver value, people would see the value in you."
Then here came someone who changed my life, Franky Lam. We met in-game and he taught me a lot! He struck me as a really smart guy! Back then he was working in microsoft and he created scripts that were very helpful the game, and I was still young and naive about how the world works as all I could think of is playing games.
It was his piece of advice sent through MSN that changed my life. He advised me to use my talent in the real world and that the real world was in fact one big game itself. That was the big wake up call for me and from that day onwards, I stopped gaming and started to focus on using my talent to deliver value and I would not be where I am today if we had never spoken.
"He advised me to use my talent in the real world and that the real world was in fact one big game itself."
This is a photo of us 10 years later in Singapore:
Jeremy Foo & Franky Lam (19/11/2018)
Sometimes in life the people around us mold us in the most unexpected ways. The little words you may have said to someone today might re-shape the way he or she is further down the road or who know that person might even change the world.
And that is how a game changed my life.