Pro Ludo — On Behalf of the Game
When I applied to Wharton undergrad in 2012, I wrote an essay called 361:06:04 (~15 days), my total play time in Kingdom Hearts, a video game that has had a particularly puissant impact on my life. I asked my essay reader — is this substance abuse? I feverishly played devil’s advocate, exhorting the magic of the fictitious, being a part of something bigger than myself, saving the world, being a hero. I wrote that games are art of the rawest emotional kind, a bundle of craftsmanship (art, design, writing, audio, tech, graphics, combat, world building) that adds up to something sensational. I had spent fifteen days captivated by the human spirit, and surely, that was something worthy of applause.
I was strongly recommended by my college advisor to abandon this essay, and ultimately, the essay that would garner my acceptance was based on something else. However, this didn’t alter the fact that the identity of a gamer was ill-received. In undergrad, gaming was mono-dimensional and characterized by Mountain Dew-guzzling, basement-hibernating, Dorito-munching neckbeards. Fast forward eight years and still not much had changed. I arrived at Stanford to begin business school with four years of D1 athletics, collegiate education, and games industry experience under my belt. We were doing intros in class, and post facto, a classmate walked up and said, “Wow! It’s amazing that you were able to get in while still playing all those video games.” This comment was well-intended, but illustrates the inexorable vice whirlpool games are stuck in. At a societal level, especially within institutions of higher education, gaming is detractive and something that needs to be compensated for via accomplishments in other arenas.
Today, I am here to change your mind. Through a combination of memory lane and fact spitting, I hope to revolutionize the way you perceive gaming and its value to a person’s identity — their dimensionality. If I’m lucky, maybe you’ll ask yourself, “Why am I not a gamer too?”
Strategic Decision Making & Optimization
I frequently aver that if I ever run an organization, part of my training curriculum will be for all new hires to play Civilization. Civilization is a turn-based 4x strategy game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) developed by Firaxis studios and designed by the Legendary Sid Meier. The game is essentially one of building a civilization on a macro scale from prehistory to the present day. Players can choose to play as a historic figure such as Catherine the Great or Gandhi. Their goal is to “win” against other civilizations through a variety of win conditions (military, cultural, technological, etc. depending on game version). You spend the game strategically farming land plots, deciding between build or buy, leveling up your technology tree, or developing governments. You befriend or ransack neighboring city-states. You build trade lines. You send spies to sabotage other countries. You are constantly optimizing between creating production centers and creating output.
Every CEO in the world should play Civilization to understand the relationship between time to build and time to deploy. You’re in a war. You build up armaments. The war ends. Now you have 100 archers that are completely useless. Can you make them into farmers? Do you pay inventory holding costs for the chance that another war comes around? Sounds like a classic business paradigm to me! Should we build up a sales org to support the product launch? Does the sales org have a dual or back-up purpose to ensure this investment isn’t wasted?
Civilization is a hard game. The amount of process, inventory, timing, unit, and relationship management is far beyond my smol brain ability. Those that are good at Civilization should be hired immediately and put on an operations org or supply chain, but everyone should play Civilization anyway because it implicitly trains your brain to future-proof investments, min-max, and structure operational pipelines.
Teamwork & Influencing Internet Noobs
Have you ever been on a team that is not moving towards the same goal? Have you ever had an incompetent teammate at work? Who made you wonder, at all times, what they were doing and how it was contributing to the company? Have they ever thought that you too were ALSO incompetent? Enter the beautiful world of team-based shooters and MOBAS. Do you think that one BCG or Goldman analyst is bad? Try getting your sh*t DPS Genji or Yasuo to do literally ANYTHING productive. Should we rotate top lane? Should we capture this point? Can you please heal me since this is your ONE JOB? The universe of online PvP (player vs. player) gaming is a training ground for frustration like none other.
Games like League of Legends, Dota, Overwatch, Apex, Team Fortress, and more show you the power of teamwork, coordination, and the difficulties of getting someone else to do what you want. You might not be running a company full of puerile boys or girls, but I’d bet you’ll run into someone who is bad at their job. Guess what, you probably still need them. Or maybe you’re the underperformer and you could use someone to support you. Games have taught me much about how to “get people over the internet” to do what I want. In a remote world, it’s not inconceivable that this is an important skill.
Behavior & Ethics
In Japanese role-playing games (JRPG), players are often exhorted to make choices. Some choices have deleterious consequences, and others help a character in need. The classic setup is: normal ending, bad ending, good / secret ending. Based on your choices throughout the game, you can cause the entire society to collapse, world to burn, lead character to die…the list goes on. In a game called Final Fantasy Type-0, you play in a party system of fourteen students called Class Zero at a magical academy. In classical JRPG structure, a group of children are expected to save the world from a calamity called Tempus Finis. About two-thirds of the way through the game, Class Zero is approached by a powerful deity and offered a chance to become L’Cie, a divine human hybrid with great physical and magical power. At the end of the game, if a player accepted the offer to become L’Cie, i.e. succumbing to power humans ought not to have, Class Zero is dropped into an unwinnable level, dooming the world to the calamity of Tempus Finis. If the player refuses the deity’s offer, Class Zero defeats the villain and halts Tempus Finis; however, without the godlike powers, Class Zero is fatally injured and the entire squadron of fourteen dies, giving their lives to save the world.
I cannot overstate the emotional gravity of an ending that kills your entire roster of characters. You chose the noble path, you saved the world, and the characters that you have spent 80+ hours with die in the most melancholic tragedy. This is emblematic of what it means to be a good citizen in Japan — self-sacrifice for the greater good and punishment to the power-hungry. Games teach lessons like these in an extremely visceral and powerful fashion and can be a powerful vehicle to instruct society on how to behave and what it means to be a good human.
Mental Health
The summer before business school, I played my first ever game front to back uninterrupted. The game was called Gris and it runs just under six hours. It’s an indie game made by a Spanish studio called Nomada, about a girl struggling to regain her voice and overcome trauma that removes color from her world. I wrote a longer piece on “The Power of Tranquility” and Gris’s minimalist game design as a much needed hiatus from the more action, more mechanics, more graphics, more explosions AAA world. Playing this game was one of the most profound and beatific experiences of my life. The soundtrack is remarkable, and Gris’s journey is one of the best-cataloged experiences of recovering from trauma. Beyond Gris, games have been winning accolades for the amelioration of mental anguish, from players regaining purpose after a loss in the therapeutic farming simulator Stardew Valley, to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game that uses visceral audio surround sound to illuminate what it feels like to suffer from psychosis, be delusional, and hear voices in your head. The game has saved a boy’s life, who, after playing it, realized he was suffering from mental illness. I personally have played this game with a set of Audeze Penroses and it feels like no other game I’ve ever played.
I will not go as far as to say I have been saved from suicide or violence because of games, but to conversely say games produce violence in their players is a far cry from the truth. Games have allowed me to experience peace that I have almost never felt in real life, and I am not the only one.
Traveling
Before coming to Stanford, I had been abroad three times. I was a slave to athletics programs since the age of twelve, and although those pushed me to far-reaching points in the United States (Gainesville, Georgia for example), I found I am grossly under-traveled compared to some of my classmates. When we talk about world travel, I found myself leaning heavily on “game travel.” For example, I have never been to Tuscany, but I know the region of Toussaint, a duchy under the Nilfgaardian empire, like the back of my hand. Inspired by the wine country of Mediterranean regions in Italy, Spain, and southern France, Touissant from The Witcher is my Tuscany.
Throughout many more travels this year, I find myself discovering the world in reverse order. To me, the Irish Cliffs of Kerry look like fictional Skellige, and the small town of Jeonju reminds me of Busan in Overwatch. Video games are a window to the world for those who cannot afford to see it with their own eyes.
Social Relationships
My brother, four years younger, and I played a lot of games growing up together. We started with Gameboy Advance games like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh Dungeon Dice Monsters, and Monsters Inc. When the PS2 came out, we plowed through co-op games like Ratchet and Clank Deadlocked, Shrek 2, and Champions Return to Arms. Eventually, we graduated to League of Legends, where I have spent eight years in what I call “the Lane of Flame” a.k.a. getting shit on for missing a cannon minion and face checking bushes. Even for games we couldn’t play together like Kingdom Hearts (single-player narrative), we both played them regardless. We have an infinite well of shared experiences, stories, characters, worlds, and music we both love. Without games, I’m not sure my brother and I would have spent so much time together.
I organized a dinner for the Stanford GSB Gaming Club a few weeks ago, and I asked everyone to share a “core” gaming memory. Thirty people in a row (tiny club, we’re underfunded, plz help) shared stories of basement games with friends, running into alleys in World of Warcraft, and staying close with a family member who was geographically far away. If you think gaming is anti-social, you’re wrong. Even if you play alone, you share an experience with someone out there in the big blue globe. You, the game, and everyone else who played are infinite.
Conclusion
Games can teach you to become a strategic thinker and how to flex influence and work in teams. They’re a way to learn between right and wrong, and a medium of introspection that can save yourself from your worst self. A way to travel the world and buttress the foundation of your social relationships. There are a million more stories I could tell about how games taught me French Existentialism (shoutout Disco Elysium) or took me on the wildest rock n’ roll ride with the baddest devil hunters you can find on earth in Devil May Cry. We are all stockpiles of experiences, cement layers laid and dried. Every game I’ve played is in this foundation of me. Additive, not inimical, and without a doubt, not a waste of time.
Editor: Claire Yun
