Over my summer holidays, I’ve learnt a thing or two about several life skills, such as nerve-control, perseverance, and how to learn skills. And all it took was taking on a challenge that most people wouldn’t even know about. What challenge am I talking about, however? It may not be what you’re expecting.

Recently, I’ve been attempting something new in my free time. There is a genre of games known as “FNAF” games (FNAF stands for “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, which is the original series of games that inspired the thousands of fan-games in the genre). The main idea of each game is that you’re stuck in an office and must survive for a set amount of time, using tools and devices to defend yourself against multiple enemies. A simple concept, usually a horror game as well. However, it can also be about challenge.

Most FNAF games aren’t all that difficult. The whole point is to make you feel scared and powerless, and you can’t really feel that way if you’re more frustrated than you are scared, right? However, there is a sub-genre of FNAF games that are dedicated to being nothing but hard. Forget the scary jump-scares, or the creepy atmosphere. Pure, unadulterated, difficulty. That’s what matters. There is even a whole community who created a list of games ranging from the hardest ones to the easiest based on their “max mode” (the hardest level in the game). Now, during my summer break, I decided that it would be a good idea to work my way up this list. From the easiest of modes, to the hardest. Couldn’t be that hard, right?

Oh boy, was I wrong.

Each mode was much harder than the last. The first one took me four attempts, about ten minutes of gameplay, to complete. Not bad. Then the next one. Four hours to beat. The next. Eight hours. And this was not including breaks, mind you. Both of those mode each took two weeks to beat.

However, despite how long it took to beat each mode, I still beat it. And along the way, I developed some skills that I could apply in real life.

First, each max mode required that you played for a set amount of time before beating them. So, if you lost right at the end, you’d have to do it all over again. Dealing with this meant that by the end of any of these max modes, I was sweating bullets. My hand was often out of my control, and I’d start to panic simply realising I was THIS close to finishing. However, when doing something this difficult, you can’t afford to panic close to the end. You simply must bite down and get it done. Playing these max modes taught me how to keep my nerves under control, ensuring that I didn’t lose focus right at the end of a difficult task.

Second, each max mode took a long, and I mean A LONG amount of time. Two weeks to beat a single max mode is nothing to scoff at. As a result, I’d often play the same game for one hour every single day for fourteen days straight. I’d end up banging my head against what felt like a brick wall over and over again, until eventually, that wall gave way. Playing through each max mode taught me how to never give up by taking the small victories when they come and treating them as milestones. Each time I’d lose, I could say to myself “at least I got further than last time”, or “at least I managed to stop this enemy unlike last time”. That was encouraging and was what helped me not give up and eventually push through that wall.

Finally, the max modes taught me how to learn specific skills through the principle of isolation. In each max mode, you could be going up against ten, twenty, maybe even thirty enemies at once, and you have to remember all of them and stay on top of what each one is doing. Obviously, jumping into a max mode straight out of the gate is a terrible idea. However in each max mode, you can disable and enable specific enemies to practice for the max mode. This is how I learnt to beat them. I would never jump straight into the max mode. I would always isolate each enemy, learning and mastering them one at a time, before slowly combining them until I worked my way back up to the max mode. This turned what seemed like an impossible challenge into one that felt possible now that I wasn’t overwhelmed anymore.

But what’s the point of all of this? All of these skills can be transferred to anything you do in life. The ability not to panic when trying to meet deadlines. The ability to keep working at a problem over and over again, despite making no progress on the surface. And the ability to take any dauntingly large skill and break it down into smaller pieces, learning them one-by-one and working your way up to the skill as a whole. Playing these max modes taught me all of these things, and are skills I’ve now begun to use in my regular life.

So in the end, by doing something that some people may consider a “waste of time”, I learnt valuable skills that I could carry on into other parts of my life. Parts of my life that were arguably more important. Sure, it is a waste of time to play video games for an entire day. You’ll get nothing done at that rate. But shunning them and saying they’re completely useless isn’t exactly the correct thing to do. If you’re willing to challenge yourself, or at least try new things, who knows? You may develop some skills of your own that will help you with whatever you’re doing.
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Here is a link to a youtube video showcasing what one of these max modes looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM4pkro44-A