As a kid, I’ve grown up my entire life playing games. Whether it be tag in elementary school or basketball in high school, competitive, skill-based activities have always been a cornerstone of my daily life.

The bright side of playing fun, team-based games has been that society, whether that be my parents, my friends or just people in general, looks at healthy competition as a way to build traits like leadership and interpersonal communication skills. Even the original games my friends and I came up with over the years had space under the term “productive” according to the mainstream.

What is not considered by most college application reviewers or potential job interviews as a productive way to spend your time, however, is an activity that is just as productive, just as social and just as fun as any competitive skill-based activity out there: video gaming.

Unfortunately, if one were to bring up video gaming to a potential employer as a significant part of their weekly life, the employer would most likely mark that down as a negative.

Within most social situations as well, at least between people who are just meeting for the first time, telling someone that playing video games is a hobby of theirs is also deemed as “not normal.” The mainstream has this perception of video gamers as being isolated, antisocial nerds who don’t possess the tools to succeed in the real world when often the case is the opposite.

With technological advances to computers and internet connection, video games in the last half decade have exploded onto the scene of the global economy as a major market.

In today’s world, video games encompass a growing fan base with an ever larger community online to support them. Game companies now produce a fantastic range of genres that span from fast-paced multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs) to historical sandboxes filled with breathtaking attention to detail.

More important than the increasing quality of video games, however, is the fact that a massive community of people that play them are more than just nerds cooped up in a basement somewhere. On top of the athletic games that I played growing up, video games also took up a good portion of my time as a kid and helped build many of the traits that make me who I am today.

Playing video games placed me in competitive situations that required me to think on my feet, and being put in these situations every day helped me learn how to solve problems, communicate to others under pressure and develop my competitive nature.

Video games also have provided me with a truly exceptional way to stay in contact with my friends who live back in North Carolina. Rather than just text, call of Facetime, my friends and I will hop on a PlayStation 4 and play video games for an hour or two on games like Fortnite or Battlefield 4.

Playing these games every week with my friends has kept our relationships with one another firm, and playing video games with people here at Union has also served as a medium to meet new people.

So while gamers will probably never have the same standing in society as athletes or academics, the truth of the matter is that playing video games is not all that different from watching TV. Only one is socially acceptable to talk about.