Gaming Introduced Me to a New World 

I’m 14 years old and a newly certified scuba diver. I’ve heard that many years ago divers got certified because of Jacques Cousteau or an old TV show called Chasse en mer, but those were way before my time. My inspiration for diving was a video game called Subnautica. It is an underwater survival game where you are stranded on an alien water planet and have to dive to collect resources for fabricating equipment such as better air tanks, tools, and eventually submarines. The end goal is to leave the alien water planet. The parts of the game that inspired me the most were how calm I felt while floating in the virtual world and looking at the beautiful ecosystem. 

The game’s underwater world is extremely realistic, with every species having its own behavior — some creatures hunt other fish for food, some are more defensive, and some are completely passive. There are different types of fish in different areas. The deeper you go, the more territorial and aggressive they are, but they will ignore you and continue hunting for food if you keep your distance. One fish likes to explode if you get too close to it. I don’t know why, but I found it comical.

The process of getting certified to scuba dive was fairly simple. I completed an online class to learn all the safety information. Once I passed the online class, we took a family dive trip to Key Largo, Florida, for in-person training. On the first day we learned safety and equipment basics, treaded water for about five minutes, and then attached our regulators to the tanks and did some pool diving. It was an amazing experience to float weightlessly in the pool. After the pool dive, we went straight to open water to repeat the process.

The weather was fairly rough during our training, so the waves threw us around while we were on the surface, but it was serene when we went deeper. It felt similar to the pool dive but with the added beauty of the coral reefs.

On the second day we learned some more advanced safety procedures and useful techniques such as clearing our masks and buddy breathing. We practiced those skills in the pool and made sure we were good at them before repeating the techniques on another open-water dive. 

We focused on equipment on the third day, so we practiced orally inflating our buoyancy control devices (BCDs) and operating dive computers and compasses. The pool was too small for compass work, but we practiced the other tasks in the pool until we felt comfortable and then moved to the open-water dive. 

The final open-water dive was difficult because the weather was still rough that day. The water was cold (my wetsuit being too big didn’t help), and the waves were big, but we had a lot of surface techniques to complete in those challenging conditions. 

Once we made it through the surface skills, the diving got much easier. I dived to about 20 feet (6 meters) and no longer noticed the waves. We fairly quickly finished the last bit of skills practice, which was navigating with a compass, and then we had 20 minutes to explore the dive site. That was the most fun I had on the whole trip. Going wherever I wanted with my buddy and enjoying the peacefulness was amazing.