Sunday, March 23, 2014

Channeling Obsessive Gaming Habits

I was taking Accounting 101, about 5-6 years ago. Around that time to keep me interested I worked Traveller Balance Sheets and Income Statements. Around the same year a friend who knew of my penchant pointed out and lent Harn Manor. Yeah, Harn Manor wow. Traveller and Harn made accounting fun for me (and of course my wife who is as a CPA).

I'm no accountant, although I play the support character often, but It was very useful to channel all that obsessive behavior with games into accounting and methods of analysis. One of the most important lessons was the habit of organizing information and making room for notes. Much of the exercises in my accounting studies was analysis, it got really interesting when I imagined Company A or B as Shadowy Corporations in a Action Genre game or Traveller merchant company trying to make ends meet.

Anyway, one thing that I really learned was if you have a player full of energy - make him do the accounting and business analysis. Holly crap the energy I had 5 years ago, and compared to now. One is that they get training and practice is a very useful skill, but since it was trained to Frame an experience in a way to be fun it also trains in a Coping mechanism.


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