Awesome Ways Video Games Tied Into Real Life

Video games don't need to exist only in a virtual space. Gaming has become such a part of our everyday lives that it often creeps out into our reality and affects us in very real ways. Of course, the most common real-life consequences of excessive gaming are blood clots, relationship troubles, and insomnia. But there are countless other actual human events directly related to gaming as well. Here are a handful of awesome real-life stories made possible by your favorite digital pastime.

Curiosity was an enormous multiplayer mobile game, where all the players tapped on an enormous cube to make smaller cubes disappear, all in a collaborative effort to get to the center. While it sounds like an exercise in wasting time, the first person to reach the center would be awarded a mysterious prize, only revealed to the winner. Once someone broke into the center, it was finally revealed that the winner would become a paid decision-maker for a game called Godus, which sounds like a sweet deal—until developer 22Cans never lived up to its promise, leaving winner Bryan Henderson with neither a prize, nor a new job.

There's really no greater documentary about video games influencing lives than The King of Kong. It documents amateur player Steve Wiebe's attempt at scoring the world record in Donkey Kong, much to the chagrin of Billy Mitchell, a professional player who seems stuck in the 1980s, the era in which he scored his life-defining victory. Both players' lives weave around a singular game, and even though both would eventually lose their titles to newer players, it's an emotional view into small-scale competitive gaming and how it affects players.

There are literally dozens of geeky dudes who have proposed to their girlfriends using video games, whether they've used Chrono Trigger mods, customized Minecraft, or Little Big Planet levels, or even completely original games designed for the express purpose of getting their girl of choice to submit to the ring. You'll find just about all of these on YouTube, but none are more elaborate than Gary Hudston's proposal, which incorporated a custom Portal 2 level, including the original voice of GlaDOS. She said yes, but gentlemen, make sure your girlfriend actually likes games before you propose to her with one. Half of these ladies just seem perplexed.

America's Army was developed by the US government as an unabashed recruitment tool for the actual Army, using realistic situations to show the experience of war. If you don't run away traumatized and terrified, you might just be cut out for to be all that you can be. Part of this realism is a virtual medical training course, which gamer Paxton Galvanek was very familiar with. So, when he saw a flipped SUV with a dismembered victim in South Carolina, Galvanek didn't hesitate to hop out of his own car and use what he learned in Army to slow blood flow and ultimately preserve the victim's life until actual paramedics arrived. A little bit of information went a very long way.