Newzoo, the leading provider of market intelligence covering the global game, reported there were 2.67 billion gamers in the world at the end of 2019 (Louis, 2020). Besides, videogame branches reported increases in the number of players and copies sold of their flagship videogames such as “The Sims 4”, in which people can create a new virtual life, go to the university, manage to pay bills and get money, have a family, and form complex relationships; League of Legends, a competitive and cooperative strategy game, which motivates gamers to create well-structured strategies with their gaming groups to defeat their enemies; and “Minecraft”, the most famous survival, multiplayer, crafting videogame, takes all its players to unknown worlds, in which they have to collect natural resources, build refuges and survive as much as they can till they can manage to reach the end of the game. Taking this information into account, it is easy to notice videogames’ educative possibilities, content, and social influence in today’s society. However, many adults still believe videogames must be erased, arguing they are a waste of time and form violent and asocial habits in children and teenagers’ behavior. This negative one-sided perspective prevents adults to see how playing videogames is beneficial for society since it improves people’s cognitive and social skills.
To begin with, it has been proved that people who play videogames have better solving-problem skills. Due to videogames’ complex challenges, players must put into practice different strategies and ways to get out of different problems, which can leave their characters out of the resources they might need to survive or to keep going to the end of the game. As Granic et al (2014) said in their investigation about videogames and their benefits in people’s lives “problem-solving seems central to all genres of video games (…) In-game puzzles range in complexity from finding the quickest route from A to B to discovering complex action sequences based on memorization and analytical skills” (p. 69). Indeed, videogames need a challenging factor to keep the players, not only engaged to the game but to keep them thinking about the ways they can get out of a specific hard stage that puzzles their mind, also allowing them to cooperate with their gaming group and move together forward the victory, which creates the perfect scenario to share and improve solving-problem strategies.
Furthermore, thanks to the challenging factor mentioned before, and the possibility to cooperate with others, gamers have created big gaming communities from all over the world. Nowadays, most of the videogames offered are multiplayer, which allows gamers to be competitive within each other, to cooperate and unlock achievements, or to do both depending on the game. Thanks to the different situation players can be involved in through the games, they would rather have to decide how and with the support of whom they would fight someone in the game, or discuss with the others whether or not would be the right decision to keep the game going in the best way. These kinds of decisions are complex and lead them to develop important social skills, such as leadership, relationship management, verbal and written communication, and so, which can help them to distribute the different missions that fit better to everyone playing. As an illustration of all of this, the communities of gamers that Minecraft and League of Legends have created round over the 80 and 200 million players from all continents. This fact has made different videogame branches, such as Riot Games and Mojang (the companies that own the games named before), create big events and contests in which players with their gaming groups meet and play to win expensive prizes and global recognition in their respective gaming community.
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