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?
True story. Am a controls engineer. I program stuff like the production processes for pharmaceuticals, F&B, etc.
I come from a time where most games were single player you couldn’t pay to win. Not all games had cheat codes.
What we did have were memory/hex editors, game files, .ini stuff.
With what little instructions you could find online, you had to dig around and figure out where to find stuff and how to edit them so you got unlimited gold or super powerful equipment, etc and not crash the game at the same time.
Little did I know, this built my foundations for controls programming and troubleshooting. There are so many parallels like using memory editors is so similar to our debugging software where we want to find individual parameters that aren’t behaving or communicating properly.
Playing balatro teaches you why the order of operations is important.
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 remember people talking about stories where someone got a great job because they happened to be a big guild leader and someone at the company was in the guild. It makes sense to me, just running a 10 man Kara with people that already knew what to do was exhausting.
And I did this back when we had 40-man raids as the norm. It is a job.
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.
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…?
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.
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.
Its the hardest and best MMO to not play.
The gist is basicly it has the most complex in-game player organizations/managment and shockingly few “rules”. Your not allowed to RMT*, dont cheat the game client, and your not allowed to impersonate a dev/mod. Beyond that, go nuts, so the space conflict is real, the politics is real, the espionage is real. The actual game is very math focused, and slow (the server runs at a 1hz tick, most other MMOs are 60+) and that allows those big fights that make mainstream gamer news as armies of 10k angry nerds all try to murder their space rivals.
TLDR: I love the game. The people there are some of the most intense MMO players out there, its not everyones cup of tea because its spreadsheets in spaceships.
One thing I’m wondering is what part players play. From what I understand Eve doesn’t really have any kind of power fantasy to offer players, it’s pure business? Does that mean every player eventually becomes a cog in one of the big machines that run the world of Eve, much like in real life?
Functionally yes, being a worker bee in a large alliance is probably the most normal MMO expirence you can get. Fleets are called, you will have your own corp leaders that act as HR for the alliance, you go farm the space or just chat in stations with your friends. The power fantasy is there as well, but the process to get there involves being much more specialized and flying expensive things (Titans are 2k$ golden space coffins).
The nice part is being a cog is optional, but recommended, its a much more social game. Hell, ive been to several of my former corp mates weddings, and the Iceland/Las Vegas convention manyl times. The stress about going it alone mostly stems from the games rules of engagment. In a majority of star systems (anything not High Security space, but that opens up a new can of issues), if your alone, you truely are alone and people in the local system should be treated as hostile by default (if you can even see they are there).
It really does sound like a second job. Complete with work conventions and chats in the break room/water cooler until you have to get back to work. I suppose there would be a sort power fantasy in being able to buy a fancy yacht for oneself.
You are 100% correct. Im semi-retired (winning) from the game and while I remember my time cosplaying as a space bureaucrat fondly and will attempt to get involved every year or so. I do not wish some of aspects of that game on my worst enemies.
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!
Gaming teaches you how to navigate menus and utilize hotkeys to improve efficiency (at least on PC).
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.
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.
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.
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
Oh sure, I’m not applying for NASA over here, but.
Kerbal Dust is a great band.
Never heard of 'em.
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.
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
