How to Make Playing Games Work for You
It is estimated that at least one billion of the eight billion people alive today spend an hour or more per day playing games. Many play games at an online casino such as Everygame Casino or anywhere they can find games to play.
Many others play board games with friends or family. Many participate in sports. If you can expand the definition of games to include puzzles, then many more people spend an hour a day on games.
Playing Games is Definitively Not a Waste of Time
We are all familiar with the parental mantra: You can’t play games until you finish your homework. Or: You can’t play games until you clean up your room. As adults, we still have a tendency to insist that we get our “chores” done before we allow ourselves to play games.
This all would seem to indicate that games are to some extent a waste of time. The fact is that games have been shown in numerous studies to be a vitally important expenditure of time!
Games are an escape but that is a positive statement not a negative one. Playing games is a highly productive escape!
The Online Effect
There is no question that the hand-held computer—what we normally call a smartphone or a tablet—has dramatically altered the way people live and play. An overwhelming majority—exceedingly close to 100% of all people under twenty play games online regularly. Adding to the mix all the time that young people spend on social media, and we arrive at an investment of time that would have been staggering to the generations before smartphones.
Whereas many people do feel that hours spent on social media might not be the best way to spend productive time, the same cannot be said about playing games.
The Value of Playing and the Value of Playing for Real Money
People have been playing games for many millennia. Playing games has served as a perfect conduit for social interaction, to forge friendships, to fill in the hours after work, and to bring families closer together.
We are not sure when people started betting on the outcomes of games. We do know however that some sports, such as horse racing or even camel racing, lent themselves to wagering a very long time ago.
We “Bet” on Many Things
In addition to playing online casino games for real money, there are many other ways that people “bet” on things. Everyone who has a salaried job—and most people who are self-employed—have retirement funds which are basically a wager on the viability of the national and world economy for the next, say, fifty years!
Today, people also “bet” on games when they offer large contracts to athletes to play for their team. This is as much playing a game for real money as is spinning the reels in slots for an hour. The only difference is the difference of scale.
Sports betting is a fast growing area of wagering.
Game Play Has Many Personal and Social Benefits
At this point, we would like to extend our discussion of gaming into an area that many online casino gamers may not have considered before. Gaming has many benefits in addition to being a pastime, an entertainment, and a possible way to win some money.
After all, as an online casino, Everygame Casino Red can offer unlimited free play. We often encourage gamers to play in our free play mode in order to get familiar with a new game. A few gamers use our free play offer to simply play our more than 300 games!
Some of the benefits of game play are pretty apparent when we take the time to think about gaming while some are a lot less obvious.
Curiosity
Playing games gives our natural curiosity a boost. It does this in two ways. The first is that games are a diversion from everyday responsibilities and activities. As such, they serve to help us renew our minds to tackle the challenges of the rest of that day or of the next day. We need a healthy dose of curiosity to be able to creatively approach any problem we might face.
In his monumental work, Zen and that Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig spoke about how people go about tackling a problem. He made the point that people first need to be curious about finding the correct path to a solution. He also spoke about “caring”, that caring is a very important aspect of problem solving.
He also said that people often need a diversion to rejuvenate their mental curiosity! People usually don’t think about gaming in this way but, as a diversion, online casino gaming works wonders to enhance our sense of curiosity.
Many gamers get their inspiration from playing games. A young girl or boy might get interested in urban development after playing Monopoly! A person might become interested in spatial relationships after playing chess, checkers, GO, or similar games!
Game Play Develops Our Willingness to Accept Challenges
A game may be just a game but, if we play the game to “win”, we are always faced with challenges. We need to make decisions! Even the simplest of games often require us to make decisions.
It is a modern phenomenon that many people, given that we have so much more free time than previous generations had, actually find it hard to make decisions! In the past, many decisions were “made” for us. If we were hungry we ate what was available.
In the classic American novel, Tobacco Road, one of the characters stole a bag of turnips and ate them all himself. He “told” the readers that turnips were his “favorite eating”!
The pizza and ice cream generation would certainly have a hard time understanding how that might be so.
Gaming Gives a Sense of Accomplishment
When we play a strategic game, we have to decide when to go on the offense in a big way. A player who bides his or her time before jumping into the offense with “full force” might later feel a sense of accomplishment that she waited patiently until to time was right to strike.
Some people are workaholics. For them, taking time from work to play is very difficult. As a work in progress, they might legitimately take some pride in putting their work aside and engaging themselves and possibly others in….a game!
In online gaming, we might get a feeling of satisfaction by setting time and money budgets for ourselves and sticking to them. For some people, this is no small accomplishment which is why we repeat the advice again and again.
Worldwide Reach
Online casino gaming allows gamers to expand their cultural horizons. They can interact with gamers from every country in the world. There is an infinite amount of new knowledge people can learn simply by interacting with people from other cultures over a casino game.
Games Help us Learn to Control Our Emotions
Any game will trigger our competitive spirit. Humans have always been competitive and competition has been the driving force for economic development forever.
At the same time, a game is just a game. As a famous coach in American football told his daughter who was crying since her father’s team had just lost the championship game, “It’s Okay. You can’t win them all”. Games should help us to learn to enjoy the games for their own sake.
This is true even of casino games that you play for real money. It is especially true in very highly competitive games like poker. We all are familiar with the term “tilt”. It is the poker way of saying “rage”.
Letting the game be the center of our attention rather than winning is a big step in people’s growth.
Everygame Casino Offers Help to All Gamers
Our commitment to gamers’ pure enjoyment of our games can be seen in two ways. First, we have published many articles that give excellent tips to players. The articles section is at the bottom of the home page.
Secondly, we offer many bonuses to players. New players at Everygame Casino can play with as much as $5555 of the casino’s money! We welcome all gamers with pure gaming spirit!
Happy Gaming!