Dear Max and Dave...
♪ [Extra Credits theme] ♪
For years in grade school, when I was right around your age,
we had these exercises where they would take us to the library
and tell us to research a topic, or give us research papers where we were supposed to find
seventeen sources and list them in our bibliography.
But for me, none of this ever stuck.
No one ever really explained why you needed seventeen sources,
or why you even needed two sources. Heck, nobody ever explained to me why we needed to research at all.
Games taught me different.
There were lots of games I had read the Prima strategy guides for,
or dug through Nintendo Power to find out about their secrets,
but when I got to high school, I started playing a game called EverQuest.
Now, I spent far, far too much time playing this game, of course, but as I played,
I realized that I could play better, level faster, and get better equipment
if I didn't just play the game, but studied it. So, night after night,
I would pore over webpages comparing leveling paths and investigating where to get the best gear for my level.
I probably spent half as much time looking into the game as playing it!
Because I learnt that I could play twice as effectively if I really learned what I should do.
And, besides this, there was something exciting to the learning -
to just going out there, and studying something that I was interested in,
and forever having knowledge that I didn't have before.
So I would go out with every free minute I had and hunt down all the information I could.
I would cross-check leveling guides, bookmark the gear I wanted to acquire, and filter out
all the bad and unreliable information that came with those early days of the Internet.
Then one day, I was given this massive history report to do.
And as I started looking into it, I felt so clever, because I realized
I could use the same techniques to find out everything I needed to know for this paper.
I could do it quickly, and efficiently, because I knew how to hunt for this stuff,
unlike all of those who didn't spend their days researching stuff.
And, man, I just attacked this thing.
I dove into it, thinking about how quickly I was gonna to be able to rip through this thing and still nail it.
Then, I stopped.
I remember the exact moment - I had Soundgarden turned up to 12.
It was so loud that I couldn't even hear my keystrokes, despite the fact that I was pounding away
at my old, grey, monochrome keyboard on the Windows 95 box in my folks' basement.
And there it hit me: This wasn't like what I had been doing for EverQuest -
it was the exact same thing I had been doing for EverQuest!
Playing that game had taught me to research. To really research.
To understand how to filter the sea of knowledge that's out there
and come away with what I need.
And it wasn't just EverQuest - I did this all the time for games.
I did it when I was trying to get your sister all the Pokémon in the very first version of Red,
I did it when getting ready for StarCraft tournaments, in the days when Battle.net was a new thing,
and I see you doing it all the time playing Minecraft.
You go to wikis, you go to YouTube, and you hone in on exactly what you want to learn.
You do the research you need to get the knowledge that's gonna make you more successful.
We live in an incredible world right now,
where anything you want to learn, anything you want the answers to,
is available at your fingertips if you know how to look for it.
Games will teach you just that. Games will teach you how to look -
or, rather, games will motivate you to teach yourself that without you even realizing it.
And this skill has carried me through my whole life -
through college, through graduate school, when I went to get my first job as a designer,
even when I write these episodes today!
When I first needed to know how to start a company, you know what I did?
I used the exact same skills that helped me figure out how to get through Lower Guck.
The first time I wanted to build a computer for myself, I wasn't intimidated
because I knew I could go out there and get all the information I need.
I could find step by step instructions. I could get a broad overview. I could find out what parts were best for the price.
And all that is no different than what you do to figure out how to make a cool redstone contraption.
But perhaps the most important part of this is that games left me unafraid.
They had armed me with this tool and told me that I could use it to learn anything,
and in doing so put things that were mystical and out of my reach within my grasp.
This may not resonate for you for years, but I have seen many of the people I know hesitate
or simply give up on things they wanted because they felt like they didn't know how to do them.
But for me, it was different.
After all, if I can slay ogres and unearth ancient artifacts,
[Outro music starts playing] why should I feel like I can't fix a car, or start a business,
or tie a tie?
See you next time!
♪ [Outro music] ♪