My job role is a Technical Lead. When researching some cloud technologies for adoption I came across the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Landscape web page which lists all cloud technologies that come under their umbrella.
The sheer number and variety of them made me realise that perhaps players of games like Magic The Gathering or Dota would probably feel right at home when designing cloud applications since the job involves identifying apps that synergize with each other and min-maxing their costs.
So I was curious if there were more such examples where gaming skill could translate well to real life jobs?
I learned more about leadership than one would expect by being a leader in a major WoW guild back in the day. Managing people is managing people.
I learned to type gaming. Learned much better hand eye coordination. Learned about history. Learned about critical thinking and problem solving, context clues. All translate very well into life skills.
I mostly play fighting games nowadays and I think people can learn a lot about mental self-improvement by playing them online. Namely:
- The main one for me: how to accept losses and learn from them. Losing/making mistakes is not the end of the world but an opportunity to learn from, grow and get better. Losing gives you experience if only on what not to do in a given situation
- Not expecting short-term improvement and that you’ll get better at something overnight. Be patient, understand and accept that on some days you’ll be at the top of your game and on others you can’t even think straight. Think in medium-to-long term
- Sometimes losing/making a lot of mistakes will get you mad. And that’s okay. Take a breather if you can.
- Not comparing yourself to others and let yourself get discouraged. Everyone has their own rhythm. Maybe you’ll need to work harder than others on some things. But that’s just how it is sometimes. Keep at it and you’ll eventually see improvements.
Going back to my childhood: reading comprehension way ahead of my age group. You can’t play old jrpgs and point-and-click adventures without reading a lot.
Not sure how true it would be today with everything being voiced.
Kerala Space Program taught me orbital mechanics. Well, Scott Manley videos taught me orbital mechanics, but KSP was the motivating factor and let me learn by doing.
Sadly it’s imperfect orbital mechanics, since KSP has a simplified form of it and real life orbital mechanics has a lot more nuance
Kerbal Dust is a great band.
Never heard of 'em.
If you can use an Xbox controller, you can work for the military flying drones to murder people from the comfort of your desk chair.
I guess I’m suddenly glad that all of their controllers are too large for my hands…?
Factorio uses all the same parts of my brain as my programming job, to the extent that I can’t play it during the week without risking exhaustion and burnout.
- breaking down a complex problem into simple ones
- organizing complexity
- tracking inputs and outputs
- managing edge cases
- error handling
- designing generalized, reusable components
- tracking side effects
- working under time pressure
- handling feedback from
bitersusers
Seriously, if you like factorio and are looking for a career go into some flavor of IT/programming.
When interviewing people I do ask if they play Factorio, and if yes, I ask about their thoughts on various design constraints and strategies they explored.
Apparently playing factorio is very similar to process engineering too. If I had known that was a thing before I got disabled I definitely would’ve done that as a job.
Sim racers definitely outperform an average person on a race track even when neither has driven an actual race car before.
I also remember hearing that surgeons who play videogames tend to perform better at their jobs too.
I also remember hearing that surgeons who play videogames tend to perform better at their jobs too.
Hand eye co-ordination (especially when looking at a screen without direct feedback in your hands), stressful situations, long stints of focus…
There’s lots of benefits to gaming!
Gaming teaches you how to navigate menus and utilize hotkeys to improve efficiency (at least on PC).
Eye/hand coordination. Pattern recognition. Problem solving. Task prioritization. Cost/benefit analysis. Inventory management. I could probably think of others if i put effort into it.
Anyone who runs a guild, clan, corporation, or what ever your games group title is 100% has the skills to be a manager outside of cyberspace. If its a themepark MMO like wow, getting 10-25 nerds to clear their schedules to show up at the same time is a feat of organization, and your skills can be put to better use. If that group is a corporation in EvE Online, put that shit on your resume (I do). When I was at EvE Fanfest in 2023, there was a presentation on exactly this, a space game about cosplaying as a machiavellian space warlord turns out has a lot of overlap with being a manager in meat space.
I’m so torn up about Even Online. On one hand, I love the idea of flying around in spaceships and doing shit in space. On the other hand, I’m endlessly confounded by how it’s supposedly in reality a business simulator with a space theme.
You’re not wrong but you got to keep in mind players actually want to show up, as opposed to workers who don’t always want to show up but have to. No matter how good is your management, one sample has a significant bonus to their motivation which has nothing to do with management. Also, it often happens with guilds that players who want a reliable team move away from guilds with inactive or unreliable players and hop around until they find one dominated by a majority of active, reliable players.
Your correct, there is a big difference between wanting to be better at a game and wanting a job to put food in your face. A good guild leader/manager will recognize that and plan accordingly, but the methods they employ to gets people to do things is the same, to the point we had a catch-phrase for it.
In EvE you have four currencies, ISK (money), Time, Content, and Trust. You can buy 3 of them.
Ive had good guild leaders and terribad bosses, regardless of the motivation, people organizing is a skill and if you phrase it correctly, you can 100% put your guild leadership role on a resume.
Organizing, teaching and leading raids absolutely helped with my leadership skills and IRL confidence!
I participated in a study a year ago where i had to solve visual YES/NO logic puzzles that relied on fast pattern and spacial recognition skills. While i was doing those for like 40 minutes i was getting my brain scanned in an MRT. According to them i scored well above average in speed and precision. I feel like video games might have helped with that but it might just be genetic idk.
Macroing
I would imagine logistics simulators like Satisfactory and Factorio would give you an eye for process design and flow diagrams. It’d probably help with understanding scale, inputs, and outputs too
Not video games, but go/baduk taught me a lot about many things:
- the value of failure with review for learning
- the value of cycling between theory and practice for learning
- approaches to pattern recognition, or at least how to apply already recognised patterns (this is more or less all of thinking, IMO)
- reinforced my understanding of the ability of simple systems to produce very complex outcomes and emergent behaviour
I’m a scientist, so these are all relevant to my work, but I’ve also used some of them in my personal life.
More generally, C. This Nguyen frames games as “the art of agency” (where music is the art of sound, etc.). His observations of games are amazing and relevant to anyone working in a bureaucracy. An excellent intro to his work is his episode on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Well worth a listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/best-of-a-life-changing-philosophy-of-games/id1548604447?i=1000576579207
