The Mage:
Toan Nguyen

So tell us, what can we learn from gaming?

You can approach the topic from several different angles. One way of looking at gaming is from a macroeconomic perspective. The gaming industry is a significant part of the economy – we’re talking about revenue totaling €185 billion a year, around four to five times more than professional soccer and larger than the music and film industries combined. Just having this potential on your radar is extremely important. But there are also so many exciting facets of gaming at the human level, covering everything from aesthetics to human behavior.

What can gaming contribute to our everyday lives and to our culture?

In a nutshell, gaming is fun. Of course, we could debate what exactly the point of fun is, but in the world I live in, fun is an extremely effective tool for making things happen. People always think that only children are allowed to have fun. But fun has several different dimensions for adults as well. And you can see that in gaming. That can involve the typical enjoyment associated with entertainment, good stories and likable characters. It can be the fun of forgetting your everyday worries for a moment, getting away from it all, escapism. But it could also involve the fun of trying something new. If you take a closer look at behavioral theory, you will see that fun is one of the key factors for achieving flow. It is by far the most effective driver of creativity. Anyone who has ever played with Lego or Duplo blocks with their children knows what I mean. You just start putting the blocks together, you have no instruction manual, then an idea comes along that maneuvers you to the next block and before you know it, you’re already building things. Hours go by, the children want to play something else, but you haven’t finished your tower yet. That’s one thing. Another is the quest.

Dealing with challenges?

Exactly. That’s something I’ve only learned in recent years. The mindset, the mentality of a gamer, is extremely useful in entrepreneurship. Let me explain: I want to introduce a new product to the market and I have a concept. In gaming terms, this is my main mission or my quest. Along the way, you collect experience points and meet exciting characters. Sometimes there’s a side quest, you briefly leave the path, you don’t know exactly what it’s for, but at some point you return to the main quest. What I want to say with this comparison is that in most video games you don’t even know at the beginning which way the path will lead and where you have to go. You can only see part of the map. The rest is obscured.

Just like in real life.

Just like in real life. Each quest sheds more light on the map. Then there are the battles. You almost always lose the first ones, but then you learn how to deal with them, and you come back and try again. Most people don’t know this, but in today’s video games you can’t die. You are respawned and carry on. In the context of corporate culture, and especially with regard to innovation, this is the best form of failure culture. Try and try again. Collect experience points. For myself, I’ve taken away the lesson that I would actually structure my team in a company in the same way as I do in gaming.

And how is that?

In a game, in a team of heroes, you never have ten or fifteen characters that are exactly the same. They usually have different abilities. You’ll often have the tank, a big brawny character who rushes ahead and clears the way for everyone else first. Then there are the healers, who follow behind and supply you with medicine. And you have a supporting team, real people in the background who make the digital heroes look good. Every team will also have a mage or a magician who, in certain situations when there’s really no way out, will conjure up some magic to resolve the situation.

And you recruit the members of your team in a similar way? To have the right mix?

I try to find someone representing each archetype. In gaming, the combination of skills results in combo attacks, where the sum of the individual parts is greater than the whole, so to speak. And this idea can be transferred to the business world.

You said something about how gaming can teach us about failure. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Something I’ve learned over time is that you need to feel the pain of defeat. Maybe because it motivates the hero to train harder. Or to seek out a sage for advice. You need these disruptions to provoke new twists in the storyline. Simply put, the hero’s quest makes you stronger. That’s a thought I can identify with. At the same time – and this is almost more important for me in the context of gaming – it takes the fear out of things for me professionally. The more playfully I approach something, the more fun it is, the less stress it causes me. Of course, I also sometimes worry that things will go wrong. But then I tell myself that it’s part of the plot. So I have to go back to the village, complete another training session, go into the forest or seek out the dragon again. That has something therapeutic for me.

You have two children. How do you integrate the gaming concept into the task of raising children?

For example, when I’m learning a foreign language and they’re sitting next to me. We do a quest together, collect points – and then they clap when they or I have done it right. Gamification just means bringing the elements of play into your everyday life. That can be an online language course, but it could also be tidying up our living room. Everything works better when it’s done in a playful way.

Should learning in general involve more play?

Education needs to be gamified at all levels. We also need to ask ourselves why school reports in Germany look the way they do. Your whole life at school is reduced to a series of adjectives: good, satisfactory, sufficient, insufficient. Why can’t you download something where you can see not just this one word, but also your progress, the achievements you’ve collected? Maybe you were the captain of your sports team? Were you always on time? I think it’s a total disaster that our children’s lives and their self-confidence are broken down to these simple dimensions. As a father, I know how you can motivate children through play, so I would work with scores, with progress bars, with energy levels and badges.

Have there been any studies done on whether gamers are more successful at their job?

As part of a strategy that we developed together with a large management consultancy, I learned that the average salary of gamers is 1.8 times higher than that of others. That makes sense to me, because gamers – or top gamers – are self-taught by nature. I don’t know any gamer who has ever read through an instruction manual or game manual. They all try things out and optimize things themselves. Of course, many of them also have an affinity for numbers, as almost all video games to a certain degree require the use of mathematics. You have to calculate where you stand and what you’re doing. Discipline is important too. There’s some really funny terminology in gaming, like “grinding”, which means that you mindlessly do the same thing over and over again to make something happen. Learning vocabulary at school is really just grinding. The term “farming”, on the other hand, means collecting enough of a skill or resource, either by luck or by foresight, so you can use it at some point in the future. This is something that many strong career-minded people do: they farm mentors for a strong network. So when people today ask what happened to the nerds who used to play Magic in the schoolyard, I jokingly tell them that they ended up at McKinsey.

And what did you play in the schoolyard?

I was even nerdier – I used to play with Warhammer figures that you also had to paint by hand. That was my hobby until I was fifteen or sixteen. And while most of the people my age were going out and secretly getting drunk, I was playing video games with my friends. Some of my classmates ( … )

→ Read the full interview with Toan Nguyen in rampstyle #32.