A brilliant extract from a podcast with Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke quoted by Alex Danco in his newsletter (after joining the company).
“I’m a card-carrying member of the “video games are actually good” club. I’ve learned so many things in my life through video games … I tend to point out a few I think are extremely valuable.Factorio is one of those. It’s the one game that anyone at Shopify can expense. .. We’re building supply chains for our customers; logistics networks; and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.
The reason why I think video games are good is because of transfer learning. There’s a good book called The Talent Code that talks about this. There was a famous story about people analyzing why Brazilians became so much better at soccer than anyone else. And there were many reasons – it’s a system that’s reinforced by all these things – but people hadn’t found the key reinforcing mechanism that made this true.
It turns out, in Brazil there was a culture of playing a pickup game, a version of soccer that was played in a much smaller space and with fewer players. And the players did all the things you need to be good at soccer, but they did them significantly more often, because there was more ball contact per person. Just because that’s a different game than soccer doesn’t mean people won’t learn soccer skills. They had way more ball contact than someone who went through the British system, by the time they entered the Premier league, for instance.
Butif I sit down for an evening of poker, I make these decisions every hand. And then you look at a game like Starcraft, which I think is very good, or Factorio, and in a very compressed, fun environment, follow a certain activity over and over and over again which otherwise comes around only rarely. And doing that will change your mind, and your brain, and help you be prepared for situations you could never predict.“
