I’ve come to believe that skills and insights useful to your professional career can come from absolutely any source. Recently, I realized that a lifelong hobby of playing video games has played a significant part in preparing me for whatever measure of success I’ve found at work so far. Yes, video games. I’m serious.

As a refreshing change of pace, I thought I’d explore how two of the earliest games I really got into as a kid ended up preparing me for my career as an adult.

An unconventional topic – but why not? 😉 I mean, what’s the point of having your own blog if you can’t write about stuff like this, right? Right!

Humble beginnings

I played my first proper game on PC when I was around 6-7 years old. That game was Transport Tycoon, a management simulation we had on our shared home desktop in which you build railways, bus and ship routes and even airfields to move around passengers, mail and various industry products to make cash.

Over time you go from steam engines in 1950 to futuristic maglev tech in the 2040s while expanding your logistics empire.

Being a clueless little tadpole, I obviously sucked at the game for a long time and my companies always went bankrupt eventually after banks stopped issuing me loans, but it was still an awesome experience.

To my credit, I persistently kept at it and slowly started to understand how all of the various systems worked together: a steel mill needs to be supplied with iron ore, which it gradually turns to higher-value steel, which you can then transport to factories to be combined with livestock and grain (brought in from farms elsewhere) to make high-value goods. These, then, can be transported to towns and cities with a combination of trains, trucks and other vehicles to be sold for a premium.

Well-supplied towns with robust transport networks grow and offer more passengers and mail, eventually growing into proper cities with sprawling international airports and skyscrapers.

Spatial closeness matters, too – there’s usually no sense running a train from one end of the map to the other because vehicles make expenses rack up over time. Too short routes can be ineffective as well, since production can’t keep up with your ability to transport materials, causing vehicles to run half empty.

The game is full of deep, non-obvious, interlocking opportunities that need to be identified, planned out in advance and built. There’s always many different ways to exploit an opportunity once you identify one, all of which can be valid but which also have different downstream implications.

While getting to grips with all of the complexity inherent in a game like this was grueling at first, it was also ultimately incredibly satisfying. I would spend tens of hours building, breaking, repairing and fine-tuning logistics systems of increasing complexity and sophistication.

As my first serious game, I feel like Transport Tycoon provided me with the fundamental building blocks and skills for working as a cloud solution architect almost 30 years later. That is, the ability to intuitively find ways to fit together independent pieces to form larger, more comprehensive solutions, and then iteratively redesign those solutions to optimize them and to factor in new capabilities & knowledge over time.

There’s an open source version of Transport Tycoon available now and it is still frequently updated! The game is so well-made it still holds up well. I warmly recommend it.

One more turn..

The original Civilization from 1993 was the first game I really got addicted to – and I mean like, “set an alarm clock for 7AM on a Sunday just to play” level of addicted. It was also the first game I got after being lucky enough to get my first potato 486 PC (with Win 3.1 & DOS), as a hand-me-down from a relative after they upgraded to a newer one.

A wildly popular series to this day, the core idea of Civ games has remained the same: you start out somewhere in ancient times (around 4000 BC in the first one) and steer your civilization through 6000+ years of human history and all the associated technological, societal and cultural development.

Apart from making me into a bit of a history nerd, the game also introduced me to an important new concept: the technology tree.

Civilization’s wide-ranging network of interlinking real-world advancements from pottery and mathematics to industrialization and the theory of gravity helped me understand how developments in several seemingly-unrelated fields can – and often have – come together all at once to deliver paradigm shifts and major societal leaps forward. Technological advancement is not linear, but rather moves in bursts and leaps with (increasingly shorter) periods of relative calm and normality in between.

In our present era of escalating technological miracles, a transformative pattern of change seems to be underway once again – one that the original Civ 1 simply couldn’t predict. While a few technologies from the game’s tech tree’s pinnacle are still on their way (fusion power, where art thou?) it’s still kind of crazy to firmly find yourself deep into what the game nebulously calls “future technology” territory – stuff simply too fanciful to realistically predict for the game developers’ minds in ’92.

Over the last two decades, the availability of advanced chips combined with research into deep learning (2000s), GANs (~2014), Transformers (~2017), GPTs (2018-) and diffusion models (2020s) unlocked a cascade of AI solutions, which now have started to interact with everything from the visual and auditory arts to manufacturing and robotics in what seems like a chain of breakthroughs without a clear end state in sight.

In my work, I still gravitate towards thinking more of the long-term second-order effects of what’s happening with tech like generative and other types of AI. Now that this new paradigm is here to stay, how should security strategies and solutions evolve for what’s coming next? Which long-standing assumptions about solution design will soon be made obsolete? How will our expectations – and indeed, the very way we interact with the world around us change?

Immersing myself in Civilization as a kid helped me gain acceptance of the ever-changing and evolving nature of the world and the technology we use – a trait that’s still useful today as an architect.

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As I thought about this, an increasing volume of examples kept materializing of lessons learned and insights gained that are still very much useful today – some from very recently, some from far back in the 90s, and most from across all of the years in between.

Truthfully, I momentarily started wondering if I would’ve actually even managed to get started with a decent career at all without certain games along the way.

This topic was fun enough to explore that I hope to pull on this thread again later. 🙂 For example, I might discuss how at one point I treated one particular game as seriously as a high-flying career for years and how that ultimately taught me everything from simple persistence to teamwork, creative information gathering and even workflow deconstruction and optimization skills I rely on today.