Can A Video Game Change Your Career Trajectory?

Remember the first time you picked up a controller and realized that your hand-eye-decision coordination was making big moves? You! You were not just playing but building stories, resolving conflicts, and dictating direction, levels, and precision. Do you also remember that first time playing you realized what agency felt like, its empowerment, its “Hi World, It’s Me. I’m Doing This. This Is How I Win.”

#1. Gaming is Nostalgic, Primal.

It was exhilarating. Games and play connected trajectory and reward early on, those mental circuits that serve social and emotional development. The visceral hours spent inside a world and building a gamer identity is nostalgia+, both a celebration and Olympics for your brain. According to the article “Video Games’ Benefits for Cognitive Functions” from the Journal of Psychological Studies, “Many studies have shown that video gamers outperform non-gamers in terms of attention, visuospatial, working memory, and mental flexibility performance.”

What is also primal about gameplay, nostalgia, and tasks actively achieved by hand reminds us that we have done this for thousands of years to survive and collaborate. Video games have grown in their power to connect and break social barriers, providing a “unique environment in which individuals can play with a very wide range of other people with scarcely any boundary including across age, sex, language or location,” according to a 2018 Computers in Human Behavior study.

#2. Gaming Now: Have We Left Something Out?

Given the aforementioned connection, performance, cognitive skill building, plus hours spent (12.8 hours per week), is the capacity of gaming at an apex? The Entertainment Software Association’s 2023 Power of Play Global Report found that 64 percent of players globally report gaming provides a healthy outlet for everyday challenges, 52 percent say it helps them get through difficult times in life, and 63 percent say their top reason to play is to pass the time or for stress relief/relaxation.

However, in today’s digital all-day-everyday lives and consumption, younger generational trends tell us that the products of how we integrate tech, knowledge, and intelligence are innumerable, and the variety is excellent. But they’re coming up short. For our most vulnerable and digital-native populations that grew up with video games (such as GenZ), the many platforms and products sorely lack in function and relation driving daily experience and community, especially around livelihood.

So, what are video games leaving on the table?

True career growth. In-game stimulation in line with and towards real-world motivation and salaried opportunities.

#3. Gaming Ahead: Its Biggest Revolution.

As a founder of an education gaming startup, I persistently ask why shouldn’t the hours spent inside a game equate skill-based building hours and workforce contributions? Time is valuable to everyone, especially to those newly entering the workforce and to vulnerable populations living near poverty whose hours are consumed with financial, food, and housing insecurities – leaving little time for job searching, let alone professional and career development.

And, here, our modern worlds of digital consumption and where real-world skills are honed are not far apart. The ubiquity of video games and their leveling access across demographics is a powerful bridge where economic and workforce development can be positioned within platforms all populations, including exposed ones, are already on.

The largest Tech Hub in the U.S., the Texoma Semiconductor Tech Hub, is one of the initiatives already ahead of the curve to uplift underserved communities via workforce expansion. Texoma Semiconductor Tech Hub unifies existing and planned semiconductor infrastructure with regional partners such as Southern Methodist University and the Stemuli gaming platform. Another initiative is in the UK and Republic of Ireland, headed up by Roblox and Ikea and their ‘Careers Done Different,’ to attract a new generation of co-workers for Ikea, launching a paid-work opportunity for Roblox players to experience working in IKEA’s virtual universe.

So here is the hot notice for the incoming and transitioning workforces and everyone in between: We hear you. We know gaming is as natural to you as breathing, and we understand how you deeply consider and evaluate jobs so they reap the same meaningful careers, contributions, and foundational rewards that previous generations had access to (promotion, home ownership, middle-class viability, comfortable retirement). The smartest platforms are converging to bring the best of both worlds to you and to ensure every level-up brings closer the strong future of work, career trajectory, and rewards everyone deserves.