Prodigy & biohacker:
Toan Nguyen

If anyone knows anything about gaming, it's Toan Nguyen, who was once described as a described as a "wunderkind of the advertising industry". At OMR 2026 in Hamburg, he will be sharing his knowledge as a guest speaker for the company EGYM Wellpass. The entrepreneur shows how longevity hacks can increase biological performance and stamina in everyday in everyday (working) life and how they can be used strategically. Not only Europe's largest trade fair for digital marketing, but also in the joint podcast but also in a joint podcast with physician Dr Anne Latz. Read more you can read more about this in the upcoming rampstyle #38 – but until then we recommend this interview with the Supernerd.

Mr Nguyen, why should we concern ourselves with the world of gaming?

You can look at the topic from different perspectives. On the one hand, we should look at it because of its macroeconomic dimension. Gaming now has a very large economic power, we are talking about 185 billion euros a year, a turnover that is around four to five times larger than the entire football industry – and also larger than the music and film industries combined. I believe it is extremely important to have this potential on your radar. On the other hand, there are many exciting facets at the human level – ranging from aesthetics to human behaviour.

What can gaming bring to our everyday lives and culturally?

To put it in a nutshell: Gaming is fun. Now, you can argue about what is fun, but in the world I live in, fun is an extremely effective factor in making things possible. People always think that only children are allowed to have fun. But fun also has different dimensions for adults, which can be seen in gaming. It can be the classic fun of entertainment, of good stories, of good characters. The fun of forgetting everyday worries for a moment, i.e. escapism. It can also be the fun of trying something out. If you take a closer look at behavioural theories, you will realise that fun is one of the key factors in getting into flow. Fun is by far the most effective motor for creativity. Anyone who has ever played with Lego or Duplo with their children knows this. You start, have no instructions, then an idea comes along that manoeuvres you to the next brick and you're already building things. Hours go by, the children want to play something else, but you haven't finished your tower yet. Then there's the quest theme.

Dealing with challenges

Yes, exactly. That's something I've only learnt in recent years: The mindset, the mentality of a gamer, is extremely helpful in entrepreneurship. To explain: I want to successfully launch a product on the market and I have a concept. In the language of gaming, this is the main mission or the main quest. Along the way, you collect experience points and meet exciting contacts. Sometimes there's a side quest, you drift off for a moment, don't know exactly what it's for and then return to the main mission at some point. The comparison I draw for myself is that in most video games, you don't even know at the beginning how the path will go and where you have to go. You can only see part of the map. The rest is obscured.

Like in real life.

Exactly like in real life. More light falls on the map with every quest. Then there are the battles – you almost always lose the first few, but then you learn how to deal with them, come back and try again. In modern video games – most people don't realise this - you can't die for good, you are reborn and simply carry on. Applied to the context of corporate culture and especially when it comes to innovation, this is the best form of failure culture. Try again and again. Collecting experience points. I've also learnt for myself that I would actually build my team in the company in the same way as I do in gaming.

How so?

In a game, in a hero team, you never have ten or fifteen exactly the same characters, but always some with different abilities. You often have the "tank", a beefy, big guy who pushes ahead and makes room for everyone else first. Then there are the healers who run after you and provide you with medicine. And then there's the support, real people in the background who make the digital heroes look good. And there's always a magician in every team who, in certain situations when there's really no way out, will pull something out of their sleeve to resolve the situation.

And you recruit your team according to this constellation?

Yes, I try to see if I have someone from each archetype. In gaming, combo attacks are created by combining skills, so the sum of the individual parts is greater than the whole, so to speak. And this idea can be transferred to entrepreneurship.

About the person: TOAN NGUYEN was born in Heidelberg in 1986; his parents fled from Vietnam to Germany at the end of the 1970s. Immediately after joining the agency Jung von Matt in 2009, he was a personal consultant to the founders Holger Jung and Jean-Remy von Matt; at the age of 28, he became the youngest Strategy Director at the agency, and at 30, the youngest Partner in the company's history. In 2019, he was among the "Top 100 Designers, Thinkers & Disrupters" of the magazine "TextilWirtschaft" and in 2020 in the categories "Young Elite: Top 40 under 40" of the business magazine "Capital" and W&V's "Top 100 Köpfe".

You just said that gaming teaches us how to fail. How exactly?

What I've learnt over time: You need painful defeat. Perhaps because it motivates the hero to train harder. Or to seek out a sage for advice. You need these breaks to provoke new twists in the storyline. To put it simply, you could say that you become stronger during the hero's journey. That's an idea 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 professionally. The more playfully I approach something, the more fun it is, the less stress it causes me. Of course, I sometimes worry that something will go wrong. But then I think to myself that it's part of the plot. So I have to go back to the village, do a training session, go into the forest or visit the dragon again. There's something therapeutic about it for me.

You have two children. Is gaming an issue there?

Yes, for example, when I'm doing a language course and the children are sitting next to me. We do a quest together, collect points - and then they clap when they or I have done it right. Gamification simply means bringing playful elements into everyday life. It can be a language course on a website, but it can also be tidying up our living room. Everything works better when it is solved in a playful way.

Should we make education more playful overall?

Education needs to be gamified at all levels. Let me give you the simplest example in the world: why do school reports in Germany look the way they do? An entire life is reduced to adjectives: good, satisfactory, sufficient, inadequate. Why can't you download something where you can see not just this one word, but the progress and where achievements have been collected? Were you the captain in sports? Were you always on time? I think it's a complete disaster that children's lives and self-confidence are broken down to these dimensions. And as a father, I know how fun it is to motivate children, so I would work with scores, with bars that grow, with energy and badges.

Are there any studies on whether gamers are more successful at work?

Yes, as part of a strategy that we created together with a large management consultancy, I learnt 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 a game manual. They all try things out and optimise themselves. Of course, there is an affinity for numbers, as almost all video games require some form of maths. You have to calculate where you are and what you are doing. And discipline is an issue. There are funny words in gaming like "grinding", which means stupidly doing the same thing over and over again to make something happen. And learning vocabulary is nothing other than grinding. The term "farming", on the other hand, means collecting enough of a skill or resource at random or with foresight so that you can use it at some point. This is something that characterises many strong careerists, they farm mentors for a strong network. So when people today ask what happened to the nerds who used to play Magic cards in the school playground, I jokingly tell them that they ended up at McKinsey.

And what did you play with in the school playground?

I was much nerdier - Warhammer figures that you had to colour in artistically. That was my pastime until I was 15 or 16. And while most people went out and drank alcohol in secret at that time, I played video games with my mates. ( ... )

→ You can read the entire interview with Toan Nguyen in the book "Knowledge is sexy".