The first ever computer game I played was called Moonbug. It ran on my first PC — a venerable IBM 286 — requiring two floppy disks to be put in consecutively, and featured the most cutting-edge graphics and sound available then … 4-colour CGA and 8-bit MIDI!

Gameplay revolved around blasting down nasty ”bugs” that were trying to land on a freshly colonised moon. You had control of the turret and needed to scroll right and left to take aim at the falling bugs. Should anything get through your defences, it was game over.

As primitive as it may sound, Moonbug was a formative influence in my development. It taught me to be curious about the moon and to get interested in science fiction. It made me tinker with my IBM PC and got me used to banging on the keyboard. Playing the game must have also taught me something about perserverance, given the number of times I died all too quickly in the game.

This isn’t a new thought, but it’s something that hit me during a conference I attended last week. A speaker at the conference spoke about the influence of computer gaming in South Korea and how the ”gaming culture” has directed the shape of the Internet culture there.

In South Korea, online gaming has become the key contributor to how young people make social connections. Gaming hasn’t just given them the chance to sharpen their reflexes, but to make friends and interact as part of a larger community. For many young people, their experience of the Internet and learning comes from hanging around online game rooms, and interacting with virtual worlds and other like-minded players.

But I digress. The point isn’t about the proliferation of cybercafes, but the idea that games and gaming are increasingly proliferating our world. My best teachers in school knew how to make learning a game. From handing out stars as a reward for doing things well, to creating narratives and storylines for our learning, they used game theory to increase our attention span and keep us interested in the lesson.

I learned about pirates and picked up a great deal of words from playing The Secret Of Monkey Island. Playing Civilization on my humble PC taught me a great deal about human history, as well as a sense of strategy. In 1999, the Counter Strike craze made me an ”expert” on guns, not that I’ve ever carried one before, but the game modelled firearms most realistically.

Then there were many other games that taught me how to solve problems, understand physics, and think faster.

Organisations today are looking at how they can implement gaming into work to keep employees more motivated, enhance customer loyalty and improve the brand experience. If you’re interested to learn more, check out a book called Game-Based Marketing by Gabe Zichermann.

The popular geo-location social network Foursquare grew immensely popular because it is a game; one where you compete with friends and contacts to collect badges and be the mayor of locations around you. There’s even a productivity app called Epic Win (www.epicwinapp.com) that turns your mundane daily tasks into ”quests” and let you ”level up” as you complete them.

What’s next? Game mechanics for homework? How about game mechanics for your workout? It’s clear that gaming is no longer a sub-culture. Walk on the LRT, and you’ll see people playing games on their phones.

Perhaps it is the innate human desire to be competitive. Or it could be that we just like fun, and it is easier to learn or complete mundane tasks, when we inject some sense of fun and purpose into it. Or perhaps it just the so-called Internet Generation.

Whatever the reason, games are getting ingrained into areas of our lives we never thought they could. For me, that is exciting.

* David Lian‘s early gaming experiences include Donkey Kong, Pacman and XCOM, which left him a thoroughbred geek. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/davidlian.