Maybe I wasn't wasting all that time playing Civilization

I read an interesting piece this morning about Logitech research suggesting IT leaders increasingly value gaming experience when hiring.

The headline statistic is eye-catching: 82% of the IT leaders surveyed said they would be more likely to consider a candidate who listed gaming experience on their CV.

It is Logitech-funded research, so I wouldn’t build an entire argument around the number.

But it made me think about something much more personal.

I’ve played a lot of games over the years. Civilization, management games, world-building games, and recently far too much RimWorld.

And I’m beginning to wonder whether the games I like reveal something about the way I naturally think.

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The colony that keeps making me think

RimWorld is a good example.

You’re constantly dealing with incomplete information, finite resources, competing priorities and interconnected problems. Food affects mood. Mood affects productivity. Power affects food. A sick colonist changes your labour capacity. A badly planned building creates another problem somewhere else.

You’re always asking what matters now, what can wait, what depends on something else, and what happens if I change this. Eventually, out of all those systems, a story emerges. I’ve written before about how RimWorld does that deliberately — it never actually writes the story, it just produces colliding events and leaves the meaning to you, which turns out to be uncomfortably close to what editorial work involves.

That sounds strangely familiar to the way I work.

Increasingly a systems job, not a writing job

I’ve spent much of my career thinking of myself as a writer.

But the way I actually work has increasingly become about systems.

I collect information. I connect things. I organise knowledge. I create frameworks. I decide what matters. I use AI tools for different jobs. I store decisions in GitHub. I build things, test them, change them and sometimes abandon them. That’s roughly what I mean when I say I work agentically: not one clever prompt, but tools and evidence connected into something that keeps moving between conversations.

Editorial Intelligence itself has become a website, knowledge system, research programme and publishing workflow.

Even my personal projects increasingly look like this.

Buying more than a games machine

I’ve been researching a new PC for my 11-year-old son as he starts secondary school. I already wrote up the buying decision itself — what AI was and wasn’t useful for, and the £999 machine I landed on. What I didn’t get into there is what the computer is actually for.

At first it sounded like the classic question: how much should you spend on a gaming PC for a kid?

But that isn’t really how I’m thinking about it anymore.

His school, Fulham Cross Academy, has a strong STEM focus. He’s interested in Roblox and Minecraft. I’m interested in whether we can move some of that activity from simply playing into making.

Roblox → Roblox Studio.

Playing → modifying.

Modifying → building.

Building → maybe a little coding.

We’ve even talked about building a Songkran game together.

The PC therefore isn’t just a games machine. It could become a shared technical playground: gaming, schoolwork, coding, AI tools, Blender, Roblox Studio and whatever else he ends up becoming interested in.

And I think that distinction matters.

The useful progression isn’t gaming leading to some mysterious set of transferable skills leading to a job. It’s more like consumer → power user → tinkerer → maker → builder.

AI potentially makes that progression much easier.

A weaker boundary than the one I grew up with

When I was growing up, there was a fairly hard boundary between being interested in computers and actually being able to build software.

I ended up on one side of it. I wrote about technology. Other people built it. I’ve written before about how that divide shaped my career, and about the regret that sat underneath it for a long time — that I’d chosen explaining over building, and that AI has since made the boundary between the two much less stable than it looked when I was choosing a side.

My son will grow up with an even weaker version of that boundary.

He doesn’t necessarily need to decide at 11 that he wants to “learn programming”. He can decide that he wants something in Roblox to behave differently and work backwards from there. That might involve code. It might involve AI. It might involve design. It might simply involve figuring out how a complicated system works.

Which brings me back to gaming

I’m not convinced that playing Civilization automatically makes somebody a better strategist, or that surviving a RimWorld winter belongs under “professional experience” on LinkedIn.

And there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here. Do these games create systems thinkers, or do people who naturally enjoy systems thinking gravitate towards these games? I suspect quite a lot of the latter.

But either way, I think we may have underestimated what some forms of play reveal about people.

The games I’ve always enjoyed aren’t really about winning quickly. They’re about understanding systems, planning, adapting, building and watching unexpected things emerge from the decisions you make.

The more I look at the way I now work with AI, the more familiar that feels.

Maybe I wasn’t wasting quite as much time playing Civilization as I thought.