How to play your job like a video game

Video games are great, they delight us, they challenge us and they reward us, but most of all, games are fun. To a certain extent, this can also be said about our lives, which have their fair share of challenges, rewards and fun but somehow find a way to delight us at every turn. If you think about it, many facets of this ‘game of life’ we are playing can be likened to playing a video game. You work, study, play and exercise to expend your energy meter, and you eat, rest and sleep to fill your health bar back up. Life experience can be imagined as gaining experience points (XP), and month by month you gain XP which might be enough to level up. But how does this relate to work? If the goal of a game is to get to the end game credits scene, then what does the end game look like for your job?

Let’s get nerdy.

Day to day tasks that you knock off your ‘to do’ list on your current projects are in-game objectives on your main story quest. Volunteering, coaching or any other development activities that you do at work could be considered as side quests that help achieve your main story quest. Developing your skills in a particular discipline allows you to level up, gaining newfound powers and abilities that would help you later on in your quests.

Video games have been around since the dawn of black and white operating systems with ones and zeros, so we might as well take a page from a game developer’s book and try to sprinkle in a healthy bit of spice into our working lives. Pause for a minute to take stock of all the skills and knowledge you have gained so far and how you apply them to your day-to-day role. What other powers and abilities do you need to clear in-game objectives? How do you get more experience points to level up faster to clear the final battle at the end of the mission? Player development and progression in video games has always been about balancing challenge and progression. Great games have that perfect blend of not being insanely difficult, but challenging and rewarding enough to make you want to continue playing. So if the gameplay is good, let’s keep playing, shall we?

New skill unlocked.

Each and every one of us is on our own journey of progression, learning on the job every day, and continuously developing and honing our abilities. Picture your professional development journey laid out as a network of skills and abilities, branching out into different specialisation pathways with powerful, game-changing abilities at the end. Picture… a skill tree.

Often in games with skill trees, players complete in-game objectives to earn skill points, which are used to acquire new skills and abilities on a specialisation or discipline of their choosing. For instance, in a fighting game I could unlock a 3-hit combo ability, and with sufficient skill points, I could upgrade that existing ability to learn a 4-hit combo, and in time the 5-hit combo, and so on. Obviously in real life our individual skill trees might not necessarily be as linear, but we’ve all got some foundation of skills that we would want to build upon (for instance, executing work, interpersonal skills or strategic thinking) to in turn branch off into our own unique specialisation pathways.

Try to visualise your own skill tree that you have been developing. What does it look like? What does your 20-hit combo look like for the skills you are building and what steps can you take to reach the maximum level? And, how does this specialisation sync up with other branches in your skill tree to give you a rounder, more robust skillset?

Imagine you’re playing a difficult mission in a game, one that tests you to your limits. With a struggle you manage to pass the level and continue playing. A few months later, you pick up the game again and play the same level once more, only this time you find it easy and not nearly as difficult as you once thought.

The more you play the game, the more familiar you get performing unfamiliar tasks. Because once you stumble through a hard mission the first time, you’ll be better at doing it on your second try, and even better on the third try, and so on. Keep clearing those levels because in time, you’ll look back at all the main story quests you’ve completed and be surprised by how far you have come in your professional journey.

Let’s talk about co-op.

Okay, single player games are great, but what about co-operative play (co-op)? Let’s say there’s a big boss battle that you can’t clear and it’s not allowing you to progress further. Maybe this would be a good time to call in reinforcements and hook up another controller for one of your pals to join in.

Taking this thinking a step further in the makeup of a team, how does your skillset complement the skill trees of your other team members? When you look at your combined abilities as a unit, what are your top strengths, and where might there be gaps? Who is the scout, who is the healer, who is the generalist to captain the team, and who can be called upon to tackle the big boss battle? Or, in non-game language, maybe you need a product manager to speak to clients and understand the makeup of the stakeholders. Or, maybe you need someone to facilitate idea generation and someone to bring these ideas to life visually.

Ready Player 1.

The more I think about it, the more parallels I draw between work and video games and how to gamify aspects of my job. There are no loot boxes we can open to get ahead in life (unfortunately), so we’ve just got to make the best of the player attributes that we’ve got now. Fortunately, in real life, when setbacks do happen, I don’t have to start again at the beginning of the level, and I can pick up exactly where I failed and continue moving forwards.

I’m not playing this game in isolation, and I’m in a space where there’s always a Player 2 who is willing to lend a pair of hands to help me get better, so that I can continue taking those steps towards unlocking more and more achievements. And therein lies one of the great joys of playing a game - it’s not just about beating the game and reaching the end game credits (whatever form that might take in a job), but rather the delight you experience in mastering the game and enjoying the ride with the players around you. So, strap yourself in, boot up the game and trust the process by channeling your inner nerd. When are you going to start playing?