We Become More When We Play Together

What if the clearest path to better teamwork starts with a boss fight? We dive into the worlds of MMORPGs and squad shooters to show how tanks, healers, and DPS reveal a practical framework for collaboration you can use at work, in school, and at home. Choosing a role in a game is more than a loadout; it’s a promise to your group about how you’ll show up under pressure. That clarity—who protects, who sustains, who finishes—turns chaos into choreography.

We unpack the “holy trinity” of roles, from holding aggro and timing shields to optimizing rotations and burst windows, and translate each mechanic into real-life skills like boundary setting, emotional triage, and decisive execution. Along the way, we share a candid Fortnite learning curve, what it feels like to be “carried,” and why good teams turn mistakes into coaching instead of blame. The result is a playbook for synergy: short, useful comms, smart risk, and a bias toward shared wins.

Community is the hidden buff. Whether we’re raiding, hanging out in Discord while playing different games, or recording together, that steady rhythm builds trust and speeds learning. We compare the energy of group episodes with the focus of solo deep dives, showing how both mirror gaming’s balance between personal quests and epic raids. If you’ve ever wondered how to apply game sense to your real life, this is your respec token.

Hit follow, share this with a teammate who needs a buff, and leave a review to help others find the show. What role are you taking on this week?

Chapters

• 0:00 Games Build Real Team Skills
• 2:20 Life Inside An MMORPG
• 3:30 Choosing Identity And Role
• 4:50 The Holy Trinity Explained
• 6:15 Tank: Holding Aggro And Pressure
• 8:00 Healer: Keeping The Party Alive
• 9:40 DPS: Damage, Rotations, Timing
• 11:30 Synergy, Carrying, And Team Quality
• 13:20 From Raids To Real Life
• 15:30 Patience, Teaching, And Skill Gaps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Video games absolutely help us to develop teamwork. And that idea is shocking to a lot of people that are not video game players. But growing up with video games, I've always seen a huge difference in the way I approach team activities, whether it's workplace or academic settings, versus the non-gamers that I'm running into. And some of the reasons that I'm able to see it that way is honestly because of my background playing MMO RPGs. When you're playing a game in that genre that stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, and these are games that feature expansive or massive virtual worlds that you can create your character and you get to basically live in. There are, of course, quests and challenges, dragons and monsters to hunt and things like that. And you can be an adventurer, the hero of a mythological style story. But inside MMORPGs, there's also crafting and growing crops and cooking and fishing and decorating your house, trying to buy your house. Real estate is actually a real thing in some of these games, and it's just as frustrating as real estate in the real world. Anyway, these are virtual worlds where you can do anything. You live in the world, you level up in the world, you get better at your abilities, and you try different challenges so that you can create a character that more or less reflects you or your vision for who you are in that world. Once you have your idea of who you are set up, you start running around this world and you see other players, okay? And these other players have made all the same kinds of decisions as you. What gender do I want to be? What kind of outfit do I want to wear? What is my battle class or my job? And that means what is the main way that I tackle challenges in this world? Once you make that choice, you're also deciding if I'm in a group with other people, what's my role? What is the best thing for me to be doing during this battle to help the group to succeed? And that brings us into how do we socially connect with other people in video games. So if we're playing an MMORPG or we're playing a hero shooter like Overwatch, if we're playing a strategy kind of battle campaign game kind of like League of Legends, we are picking our heroes or creating them, and we're choosing our skill sets. When we choose our job or our skill set, there's usually three major overarching types of players that you can select from. And this is called sometimes the holy trinity of gaming. Okay, not to be overly religious, but it's a metaphor, it's a gestalt. So uh what I mean by that is the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's what gestalt psychology is all about. And when you are a part of a raiding team or a battle party in video games, you're choosing: am I going to be a tank? Am I going to be a healer? Or am I going to be a DPS, which stands for damage per second? Am I going to be an attacker or a damager? And you need to have all three of these roles on your team. In fact, some games do not let you join a group unless the composition of the group is complete and is what it needs to be. So once you choose, do I want to be a tank? If you make that choice, your job is to support the group in the following way. You need to run towards the biggest, baddest monster and hold its attention on you. Because that monster can destroy the rest of your party in an instant. But you have defense, you have armor, you have the ability to reflect and dodge better than them. You're the tank. You need to irritate that monster so it's only looking at you. And that irritation we call taunting. So you taunt the enemy, you hold its aggro, okay, which is a word we use for the aggressiveness of the monster, who it's looking at, who it's targeting. It needs to be looking at you if you're the tank, because you can take the damage that other people can't. But that might not be the role that you want to have. You might want to be playing as a healer, which is a support class. Your goal as a healer is to look at all the health bars of your party members, your teammates, and as their health gets lower, you send a heal their way. And if they have full health, maybe you can throw a shield on them so that they have extra magical armoring on them so that the next hit doesn't hurt their health bar, it hurts their shield meter. Your goal is to keep everybody in the party alive. And if somebody does have their health bar reach zero, you have a battle res, which stands for resurrection. You can bring them back from death so they can rejoin the battle. Once you do that, you better heal them up too, because they're not going to be very healthy. They were just dead a second ago. You have a lot of stuff to think about and manage, but your view of the battle is different. You're not looking at the boss's health bar. You may be looking at things the boss is doing so you can react to it. But your main goal is to make sure you have a party alive, healthy enough to battle that big monster. So the tank is holding the aggro, the healer is keeping the party alive. But if you don't want to pick one of those two, then you will pick a damage class or a DPS class, damage per second, remember? And this class is all about destruction, is all about devastating their opponents and causing the health meters of those opponents to go down to zero as fast as possible. They have a rotation or a set of moves that they're going to play in a set cycle, and the knowledge of the player of how to do the most damage possible is really key here. Because you don't have an infinite window to attack these enemies. You have a limited amount of time before the tank gets worn down, the healer runs out of magic to keep people alive, and you need to take those enemies down and clear the room out so that you can get the loot and move on into the next room. If you have good players in one of these positions, sometimes that's enough. If you have good players in two of these positions, you're gonna be able to take on a lot of challenges. But if you have good players at all of these positions, you're gonna be able to tackle the hardest challenges in the game. It's like a team sport. If all of your players are great and all of them have great offense and defense, they all have good reaction time, they all have good strategy, and they have good ability to improvise, your team is going to be exceptional. You might even be a championship level team with the kinds of challenges you're taking on. And if you're weak at some of your player positions, other people can compensate to carry that weak player, and that's another key term for gamers is carrying someone means they might have lower skill, but you're grouped up and you want to have success. So you'll do more than your equal share because they may do less than their equal share. But overall, the group still succeeds. This might be sounding like a lot of workplace or classroom setting ideas, or even your family. Okay, not everyone contributes the same amount or in the same way. And sometimes that can be incredibly frustrating. In games, you might vote to kick a player out of the group because they just are not understanding the challenge. But in these real life scenarios like family work or schooling, you can't just kick people out very easily, if at all. And so the goal is to build people up, teach them new strategies, develop ideas of how can this team can succeed. Every challenge we face in a video game is a puzzle that is meant to be solved. We just have to find the right strategy to make that a possibility. And video games can teach us to have more resilience, but also to have more patience and mindfulness when we're interacting with other people that maybe do need a little bit of guidance and a little bit of learning to contribute the way that they hope they would. Just because you're not doing well at the challenge, it might be that that challenge is newer to you than it is to other people in the group. And in gaming, you will frequently interact with people of all different age ranges. And if you're super elite at your game, it can be very frustrating because you want to jump into the challenge that's on your level. But if there aren't enough players to fill up teams successfully at that level, you may have to go down into lower levels and build people up. And building that team skill is a way to spread the success across multiple people so that people can join you and be a part of the kinds of success you get excited for. But sometimes you have to help other people have the success that they're ready for first. And this goes both directions. I'm not trying to describe it from just the elite players' perspective or the learning players' perspective. For example, I'm new to Fortnite. I've only been playing Fortnite for a Fortnite. Coincidentally. And I've been having a lot of fun with it, and I've had some gaming sessions where I'm solo, like today on my Twitch stream. I've had other play sessions where I've been playing duos and trios, where I have one teammate or two teammates for a group of three. And I am not the best player in the group. And that's not even humility, those are just facts. But I'm having a lot of fun. And never once in any of the game sessions did my teammates make me feel bad for the fact that they run around the map better than me, they aim better than me, they take out other players better than me, and when they're talking to each other, there's a level of strategy that I'm learning, and I hear it and I'm fascinated by it. I don't have that way of looking at it yet. But someday I will. Because being part of a team is an amazing way to learn. Right? We learn by socializing as humans. We really do. That's why we go into classrooms and we have teachers that talk to us and lecture and share videos and analyze things for us and break it down so we can hear what the mind of someone who does the work already sounds like. And someday that's our mind. Someday those are our words and our ideas. And that's how video games work too. We learn from others, we see the cause and effect of things happening on the screen, we learn what to do and what not to do in so many different ways. But at the core of it, we create our character, we project our goal for that character from within ourselves into the way we play the game. And then in some games, we have to come together to achieve things that are more exciting, impressive, and fulfilling than we ever would have achieved on our own. We're social creatures, humanity. And video games give us the opportunity to exercise that need for connection in so many different ways. Some of it's competitive, some of it's based on team, and some of it's just the ability to jump into chat with other people playing different games and just talk and hang out, and we're all doing different things. I don't know if everyone knows this, but after we record each episode of the gaming persona, one of the most exciting parts of my week is when Marcus, Doritos, and myself will go into Discord and we're all playing different games. Doritos might be playing Star Wars The Old Republic. Marcus might be playing Claire Obscure Expedition 33 or Elden Ring. And I'm probably grading papers. The Professor video game. Sometimes I'll play Fortnite while they're doing that, more recently these days. And we're playing all different games, but we're still having that friendship. Our podcast is another example of something with gaming forming us into a team. And we all bring a different perspective to that conversation, and that's what makes it amazing. The Gestalt. We are more as a whole than we are separate, the sum of our parts. Now I'm doing these episodes of the solo quest in the gaming persona by myself because there are parts of my message that I think really line up well that way. But every single person I've talked to, the dedicated listeners, and the people that'll message me on Instagram, or talk to me in chat during my Twitch stream, they all have identified one very important thing. The podcasts where I have people with me have an energy to them that is amazing. But the episodes where I'm doing this, and it's just me and the topic, and all of you in chat, those are the ones that really bring out some of the deepest information. And that's what the gaming persona is, just like an MMORPG. There's quests that you go after on your own and story that you get to experience just with your own eyes. But then there's challenges where you need to squat up. And I could not be happier with the way my content is going right now to share those opportunities with all of you. So I hope that this has expanded your idea of how video games factor into a teamwork mindset and how we can overcompensate for our deficiencies with others, we can reorient tasks, we can assign people a role that better suits their play style and their mindset. But at the end of the day, the sacrifice of figuring out how you can serve the role of your group the best will make the team achieve more amazing things in that game than you ever will alone. And that's why we bond with each other in this world, too. Is because having people to enjoy life with really makes the experience of life more amazing. That's how we really level up, is with other people. So take that with you during the week and notice all the different ways that a team mentality factors into your life. Whether it's video games or something else, it's all important because it's all a part of you. And while you do that, always remember to continue the journey.