How Video Games Helped my Business Career

I'm a father to three young girls. At home, my wife and I often discuss whether we should allow them to play video games. Computer games are addictive, not as good as running around in the fresh air with your friends and probably as bad for your eyes as they are for your mental health – we all know that.

Apparently, 60% of UK adults and 91% of 3-15 year-olds report playing games on consoles, desktops or smartphones, both on or offline, every week (I’m not one of them anymore, except for an occasional game of Stick Cricket).

I spent a huge amount of time playing video games growing up. We had the original Pong, then worked through everything else: Spectrums, Commodores, Amstrads, PCs, Nintendos, Segas, PlayStations and the Xboxs. We played video games from first thing in the morning and finished at 3am, only because we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer.

This level of screen time was probably only just past acceptable then, but absolutely horrific by today's standards. We get twitchy if our girls spend more than 15 minutes playing Toca World on their iPads at the weekend.

However, in defence of video games, I like to think that a huge amount of business and life strategy was learned and developed while shooting zombies, jumping over red shells, flying spaceships and leading Hampton Wick FC to Champions League glory after 20 long seasons.

Here are my top lessons from my favourite games:

Football Manager / Championship Manager

This was the big one – days, weeks, months and whole school terms were lost to this game. I could spend a whole day scouring through Sweden's lowest league’s under-16 teams looking for the next undiscovered wunderkind. I know loads of people who were forced to literally snap the CD to stop themselves playing it.

The lessons:

• Look for talented young people who can become great – they need one or two strong attributes – the rest can be developed and learned.
• Give people opportunity, show them the route and let them build experience. If they don’t take it, hit the transfer button, and get someone in who wants to.
• Starting from the bottom and building up is way more fun than winning from the top.
• It takes time to build a great team and to see success – it doesn’t come overnight.
• Everyone wants a statue of themselves outside the stadium.

Sim City

Another roleplay game where you build a city from the sand, brick by brick. It took hours, even with the fast-forward button on.

The lessons:

• Infrastructure is vital: you need to get your services and operations in place for the rest to work.
• People can get p*ssed off easily, and if they do, it takes ages to get them back on-side.
• Cash flow is everything: if you run out of cash, everything you built disappears very quickly.
• Building too fast or too many things at once one-way street to disaster.

The best bit for me was the unlimited cash cheat - it's?so?much easier to build if you have unlimited resources to do so without having to worry about budgets. This maybe led me in life to want to build enough resource as possible to do what I want, without sacrificing something else important as part of the trade.

But, in the end, building a whole city from scratch, honestly, is much more rewarding route to take.

Monopoly

Monopoly isn’t really a video game; however, it has a few great lessons:

• Go for it, all guns blazing! Build, buy, hustle, negotiate. You are on your own, and it's up to you.
• If you don't buy it (do it), someone else will.
• Cashflow is everything.
• You need to read other people’s strategies to win.
• It's all chance in the end, and everyone starts in the same place - but if you don't build, you can't win.
• Always be friendly to the bank.

Zelda

This game placed you, as the main character (an elf), in a strange land where you have to solve riddles and puzzles to win the game.

The lessons:

• If something is in your way, push it to one side, hit it, or try to run through it.
• You never know what you might learn or find today which will become valuable in the future.
• At some point, to win, you will need to outwit or out-manoeuvre someone bigger and stronger than you.
• You need to build skills, friends and an armoury of tools and weapons to make it through.

My main memory of this game was being lost, going round and round in circles for hours only to then, all of a sudden, trigger something which launches you to a whole new level. It would have been easy to give up, but if you did you would never get to where you wanted to be - you just had to keep going.

And you were usually closer than you think to the goal.

Final Fantasy

I never understood this game and it taught me that there are some things, no matter how hard you try, you just don't understand. It’s just not for you.

If that's the case, and as quickly as possible, pop it back into the box and give it to someone who can!?

To round up, I think computer games have a huge part to play in growing up – strategy, creativity, grit, determination, ability to overcome obstacles and building imagination. I think they also build confidence, critical thinking, and lots more.

Thanks for reading, I’m going to dust off my old Nintendo and spend the afternoon playing Mario Cart (in my dreams)!