1. Empathy: It’s built into games
Being in high stress environments often takes its toll on you and the other members in your team. So how can you, as a leader, recognize the symptoms and mitigate them before it’s too late?
Chicago-based psychologist Dr. Kourosh Dini strongly believes that skill-based games like poker teach us empathy. He says, “One of the big things about many games is you’re interacting with other people in such a way that you have to actively think about what the other people are doing or thinking in order to either play against them or play them cooperatively. Either way you’ve got to be engaged in trying to think of how this person is learning and what’s this person is going to be doing next.”
2. Enhanced Decision Making Abilities
Most video games require players to follow rules, think tactically, make fast decisions and fulfill numerous objectives to win. Professor Arthur Kramer from University of Illinois discovered that games like these positively improved specific cognitive skills such as short-term memory in adults.
This makes Real-Time Strategy video games like “Starcraft II” particularly valuable to managers, who are constantly given short to mid-term goals and have to allocate resources efficiently to achieve them.
3. A New Way to Teach and Motivate
Oftentimes, managers are teachers too in the sense that they have to educate their subordinates to current processes, and also to push them to achieve beyond what they believe they are capable of.
“The learning processes behind play, I think, are undervalued,” says psychologist Dr. Kourosh Dini. “When a person is engaged in play, they seem to learn better … There’s this feeling of mastery that can happen that sometimes kids don’t get to achieve otherwise.”
Games could be the best type of learning material because they keep you at the edge of your abilities. At first everything begins at a very slow pace and it starts getting faster and harder the higher level you advance. So the better you are at some particular game the more demanding it becomes.
4. Going for the high score: Exceeding Expectations
Games immerse us into an alternate reality, and within these worlds, we embark on epic sized quests that seek to change the world. Doing these mind blowing things puts you into situations that you’ve never been to and forces your mind to think in a completely new and different way.
As people who are constantly called upon to deliver results, successful managers are the ones who constantly exceed the expectations that are put on them. In today’s wired world, what we do online can be mirrored into the real world. The way a manager deals with his or her projects can now be seen as a quest towards an epic win.
Game developer Will Wright once wrote, “…The gamers’ mindset—the fact that they are learning in a totally new way—means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact video games will have on our culture.”
