3.1: A Brief Sidebar on Gaming
Over 21 years of service, I’ve only had two bosses who didn’t see video games as a waste of my time.
I’ve always been a gamer. Since I started playing Wizard on a Commodore 64, my first computer, up through today when I travel with a Steam Deck, gaming continues to be an outlet for me to destress, to think, and to learn. I only learned DOS so I could install and run games before Windows 95. When I built my first computer in 1997, a not insignificant portion of the purchase went to buying a 3Dfx card, a precursor to NVIDIA’s GPUs that are the workhorses of the Generative AI industry. Gaming has forced me to learn a lot about hardware, and to keep abreast of new tech, which has served me well in my career.
But more impactfully, gaming gave me the problem-solving paradigm I use today. I learned to experiment, always looking for new approaches. Good game design actually builds this in, teaching you the mechanics of an artificial world without ever giving you a class. Then, when you’ve gotten comfortable and the levels get easy, suddenly the rules shift, and you have to ditch what you’ve learned and to reinvent your tactics. In games, you often need to ruthlessly adapt, to ‘drop your tools’ when the conditions change. This is something military leaders fail at so often it’s essentially regarded as a mark of our profession.
Games teach us to fearlessly fail. Too much military training is one off, with no room to take risks or innovate. It’s one and done, pass or fail, which inhibits learning, innovation, and adaptation. It leads to a culture of block checking and risk aversion in training, the very place we should be experimenting the most.
In video games, you’re going to fail. A lot.
You won’t make it through the first level of Megaman without falling down a hole, suddenly discovering you’ve died, the level reset, and you’re now minus one of those cute Megaman faces in the corner of the screen. You try again. You fail again, maybe a little further this time. You keep on, slowly getting further and further, learning as you go, and incorporating new tools as you level up. Games are a great way to get over the taste of failure.
We even use video games as part of my autistic son’s regular therapy. His autism makes unexpected transitions stressful, and there’s probably no more abrupt a transition than suddenly dying. Video games help him endure lots of failures in small doses, and slowly build up familiarity with it.
Now I write all this just to relate a simple vignette. Just about every commander I’ve ever worked for, even the good ones, looked down their nose at my gaming hobby. It was always seen as a childish indulgence, and unserious.
In the fall of 2020, I had flown to the US from Japan for a commander’s conference where I had just met my new group commander. He was coming back to Japan with my command team, which because of COVID was a much more complicated process that included restricted flights and two weeks of hard quarantine when we landed. Our departure out of Seattle required us to check in at 0700 for a flight that wouldn’t take off until after lunch.
With that much time to kill, my command team and I headed straight for the lounge. I was joined by my operations officer and my command sergeant major, where we grabbed plates of small breakfast bites and settled into comfy chairs. I popped open my laptop and pulled out a steam controller I’d picked up years ago, firing up Dead Cells.
Dead Cells is a perfect example of the mechanics I mentioned above. I’m not going to dive further into the weeds with an explanation of what a ‘rouge-like, metroidvania’ is, but for those who haven’t played it, it’s a lot like Megaman, only you only get one life. You get different weapons, each of which requires a different style of play, so you have to change your tactics as you go. At some point, the weapon you have will fail to level up enough, and you have to fight every ounce of loss aversion to pick up a new weapon. Right as the game is getting tougher, you have to be willing to drop everything you’ve learned and learn something new.
Well, just as I’d booted up Dead Cells, my Group Commander sat down, right next to me.
He struck up a conversation about work across the table with Jack, my operations officer, leaving me stuck in a dilemma. As mentioned above, every commander but one I’ve ever had up to that point has seen video games as very unserious behavior. So, there was an almost instinctive reaction to close the laptop and put the controller away. I could easily jump in on the work-related, serious conversation.
But then I’d have looked like a coward, which came with its own consequences. I dithered for a moment and opted to keep playing. My boss didn’t bat an eye, and the conversation flowed, Jack doing a great job of talking him through the operational issues the battalion faced, in particular with COVID restricting our ability to move about the theater. I kept playing, acquiring better weapons and more upgrades until suddenly, on the Ramparts, I over-reached and, trying to jump out of the way of an attack, fell off the screen between two towers.
Mid-sentence, my boss leaned over and said ‘Man, why you think you can triple jump out of the way of that guy? That’s rookie shit’. I really liked working for that guy.