Do games teach the right entrepreneurship skills?
If you’ve played a lot of games on hard mode you’re probably better prepared to build a company than you think. If you’re reading this you also probably grew up playing videogames.
Think about it. Conventional startups more often than not have a binary outcome based on what boils down to good strategy and good execution.
How long did you retry that Mario level until you found the exact buttons to push in the exact order — and then executed that pattern perfectly — to pass the mission?
The only thing that’s missing in a startup is a retry button. Most successful startups look a lot like missions in a game’s campaign in their early years and have team dynamics very similar to multiplayer games.
The best players always aced a game on hard mode and knew how it worked mechanically, granularly and ultimately intuitively. To be that good you already hit every wall imaginable until devising the one articulated plan which you had to execute perfectly to work.
We grew up playing games, watching The Matrix and learning about Quantum Physics in our dorms. Our generation knows as a fact that almost any scenario can work if we press the right buttons. And that’s exactly what building a company feels like, with just the added pressure of succeeding.
You wear different hats many times per day and try to execute under time constraints on challenges that you chose yourself. Hoping you don’t run into a dead end but also believing resilience can be used to pass any challenge that’s thrown at you.
Building an early stage startup is about changing hats each hour and doing your best in scenarios devised by you based on a map that’s just in your head. With no retry button.
Gamers are used to being parachuted in new worlds — systems — that they have to understand quickly and perform under. Considering all things fair — the very definition of a system based on rules — the only limit is yourself once those rules are understood.
MMORPGs have ecosystems behind them that teach a lot of social skills. Forums, clans, schedules being made, users being appointed responsibilities. While growing up we all managed our finances based on what games came out or what system we were saving for. If that’s not the beginning of an early stage startup started by a team I don’t know what is. The skills used daily are almost identical, including the mental strength you need to show in some games.
Learn the system and push the right buttons by wearing the right hats to execute on precisely set challenges and succeed, however you define success. If that sounds too much like the brilliant George Carlin on the modern man just laugh it out, put it in context, get back to the real game and focus on high output or Actions per minute as you would in any Starcraft match.
You all got this.
The best thing about it? Modern games are a global language with higher levels of penetration than efficient education. Who would’ve thought pushing your kids to play games might yield better results than a conventional education when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship.
