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Comment by baak | Hacker News Reader

I used to hear this argument from WoW players a lot.

"It's skills you use in every business management, so it's just like work!"

Go ahead and list it on your resume if you believe it.

An important distinction is that there are no characters to level-up in Starcraft, so you can't get "better" by just investing mindless hours into the game. The start of a Starcraft game is just like the start of a Chess game: both newbies and pros have the same options in front of them. You have to objectively improve as a player to win more Starcraft.

I never played WoW, but I would believe that there are some different managerial aspects to running a guild or organizing raids with 40 other players.

Yes re management. I had a great year or two of Travian. The depth of the game just got deeper with time - straying into politics, game/browser exploits, timing etc. managing people and picking your friends took considerable time and skill. The semi cheating that went on with multiple accounts, borrowed accounts, stolen accounts etc just added to the game. What happened on the map only represented about 50% of what was going on at the time I left. I suspect if I stayed longer, that percentage would have shrunk. Not because i what was going on was changing, but because i was beginning to see the whole rather than the obvious. The ultimate time sink. I loved it.

I have Starcraft on my resumé. If I were a master in chess, I would list that, too.

I spend my free time voluntarily putting myself in fast-paced, high-stress situations where I am forced to make critical strategic decisions as quickly as possible in order to succeed.

If that's what I do for fun, imagine what I accomplish when I'm working.

I'm a gamer. I genuinely believe that there's a lot to be learned from games via playing, studying, or building them. I know what it's like to have non-gamers look down at your time gaming and view it as worse than unproductive. However, even when I worked in the game industry, if you tried to tell me that Starcraft mastery adequately demonstrates your performance under pressure in a professional context, I'd laugh in your face.

Tangential but awesome story: A few years back, I listed a starcraft-related project on my resume.

An interviewer at VeryFamousWebCompany(tm) went totally rogue (I am assuming) and we spent a good 30 minutes discussing the most recent patch and how it effects game balance. I'm guessing he was able to justify this was some kind of analysis/critical-thinking question. And I still got an offer. So there's that.

My friend who's the leader of our counter-strike online team. (We play ESEA for money) Put that on his resume for a manager position at an apple retail store and ended up getting it. I'm sure it wasn't directly related, but it definitely helped.

For my current job, in the interview I mentioned my love of StarCraft 2. My interviewers loved it. (It was a web programming job.)

If I were an employer, I'd give you major points for being good at StarCraft 2. It's a tough game. To do well, you need a fast, strategy-oriented mind, and you need to be dedicated. Being good at StarCraft shows that you're passionate about difficult problems and that you're smart and fast enough to solve them well.

Those are good skills for a programmer, IMO.

It's entirely Joi Ito's fault. -_-

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