Friday, October 13, 2017

Book Review: Level Up Your Social Life

Level Up Your Social Life: The Gamer's Guide to Social Success, by Daniel Wendler, is a charmingly succinct set of steps and concepts to improve your social life.  The author, an avid video game player (gamer) and well-spoken autistic, seeks to teach you his methods for getting more practiced in making and keeping friends, and extending the limits of your world and interests.

This book seems to be marketed at people like the author himself, that is, autistic people who like video games.  But in truth, this book could serve anyone well, as long as they're willing to put in the effort to try the various "quests."  While the book references many different video games, it also takes care to explain those references in enough detail that you can understand them without playing the actual games.  In fact, I was clued into this book's existence by a non-gamer relative of mine. 

As a gamer of the female sex, before it was acceptable to be a gamer girl, I mostly kept to myself and played single-player games in short stints.  This was in large part because of my parents, who insisted that video games rotted your brain.  I was 16 when I started sneaking handheld video games into the house, and it took that long because that was how long it took me to find out that video games were fun to play with friends.  Before that, I was stuck with limited gaming time using our computer, and mainly using my brother's video games at that.

As such, I'd only personally played a third of the games listed in the book, and of those, actually gotten to spend a lot of time with 2-3 of them.  Fortunately, as I mentioned above, the games and the concepts the author draws from them are well explained.  I don't think a non-gamer would need to play any of the games in the book to understand the ideas in each chapter.

Onto the actual book: the advice and suggested courses of action ("quests") seemed very sound to me.  In large part, the book didn't have a lot of new concepts or tricks to offer me specifically, but it did offer entirely new ways of thinking about those things, and making them make sense.  Some basic things in the "quests" include going new places, doing new things, making a point of practicing social interaction multiple times a day, and practicing reading body language. 

Basically, in less than 150 pages, the author gives you a workable plan (broken into bite size pieces) for going from reclusively hermitting to being actively social and engaged in the larger world.  He doesn't underestimate how difficult this can be, either, which I appreciated.

Read This Book If

You think your social skills could use some improvement, especially if you're autistic and love video games.  This book is full of good advice in reasonable, bite-sized portions, and I have no doubts that following its advice will result in improved social skills.  At less than 150 pages, it is quite readable and written in easy-to-understand language.  I highly recommend it. 

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