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When Gaming Trains You For Work
ac514 writes "Parents should review their education before punishing their children. BBC wrote 'Video game skills and a good poker face online are becoming essential job qualifications in the financial markets, with recruitment drives assessing potential star traders in online gaming exams'. I knew some day these extra hours would pay off."
It worked for the Last Starfighter.
stuff
Its easy as hell to keep a poker face online. Why do you need to train for that?
Learn lisp today!
Excuse me! Online games isolate you! You can cry, kick and cheer, then reply to the email in ballanced, calm words. But if they call and ask you for a face to face meeting, where's your computer-trained poker face?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Any job openings for first post? ;)
:)
But seriously, most finance traders are utter sleazeballs and assholes so the internet and multiplayer games should be good training for them.
Maybe lawyers too?
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
I know I play Solitaire at both places
I don't know if playing games has helped me much, but I know for sure that my game development hobby got me at least one job.
:)
I went into the interview with a CD-ROM of all of my past programming work, including a few of my partially completed game projects. When they asked me, "What qualifies you to be our programming guru?" I showed them my games, and they asked me when I could start! I think they understood that game programming is inherently quite complex, and that if I could make spaceships swarm and attack in real-time, I could probably handle the optimization of their relatively simple business applications. And they were right!
Anyway, that's my story
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Anyway real money is generaly made by creating companies and letting money managers deal with the stocks. What good is all the money you make if you are working huge hours and worried about every rise and fall of the market. Day trading sucks
Learn lisp today!
The traders are just a tip of the iceberg, with the advent of the generation of people who expect instant response to things, the skills of analysing data and leaping to right conclusion most of the time is going to be a major requirement in all fields that deal with humans.
The gold standard in training should involve proficiency in both GTA3 and Leisure Suit Larry.
No one has said it yet...
In Soviet Russia, work trains you for gaming!!
Remember the visions of the future we had decades ago? We saw the future as a place of nothing but leisure for humans, while our machines did the work for us. We would spend our time playing games, instead.
But it looks more like a Slave Plantation Future, one where even our leisure time has to be dedicated to preparation for work. Gee, I wonder what happened?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
With the experience Simcity's given me over 10 years, I should be a shoe-in for a real mayoring job! Where do I start?
Come on! You'll get the FP next time! No need to be a pesky little scoundrel. Now, say sorry to mrs karma whore, smile and go hunt for FP of the next story.
YES!
Let's not get too caught up in 'gaming can have a positive impact' type talk, because then we must also admit to it having a potentially negative impact. Personally I happen to think it can be both, but I know I've heard a lot of people here argue against it having a negative impact on kids, and I'm willing to bet a large number of the very same people come out and irrationally proclaim gaming to be the saviour of the universe now.. And with that... back to my game
While growing up, my mom used to tell me that I'd never learn any useful skills by playing video games. Now that I have multiple sclerosis, and cannot work, some of those skills are essential in my daily life.
What use is being proficient with a joystick? Well, when your main means of locomotion is a power wheelchair, being able to manoever sure helps. Being able to judge speed/distance relationships helps, too - both skills fine-tuned in video game parlours.
Life sometimes throws us a curveball, and there's no way to really predict exactly what skillset might be useful at every point in time. Video games are just another skill. Arguably more common than, say, brain surgery, but then, just how many brain surgeons does the world need?
Lemon curry?
Just added my ladder rankings to my resume.
Seth: Damn! Interceptors up front! FORM UP! Have assault frigates attack the flanks, keep a missile destroyer near the heavy cruisers in case bombers fly by! Protect the mothership! FOR HIGAARA!
Co-worker: Once I find the idiot who hired you I'm going to strangle him...
Seth: Shut up or I'll TK you.
Somehow I doubt that will work...
Hate me!
So this means I should waste even more time playing GTA for training? I'll show my 100% completeness of Vice City next time I get to an interview.
...that so-called ``Edutaiment'' is just pure abuse of the quite-modern social concept of education? It, generally, is a quite bad form of scholarship multiplied by an even worse entertainment factor... ---- Now listening to: Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)
NOT!
U SUXXOR
The military has used gaming to identify potential recruits for some high value jobs and Google is famous for using puzzles and games to indentify individuals they might want to hire.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I learned to drive stick from video games. Thank you, Cruisin USA. That's not even close to MS, but just wanted to back you up on the whole usefull skill thing.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Hire enough compulsive liars, and the people that are promoted will be the slickest players of the bunch. How long does it take those people to rise to the top? 10, 15 years? You can bet we'll have another wave of Enrons just about then.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
The company where I now work were downsizing and I was hired because of my propensity to TK in team games.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
My vision of these guys is that they spend their entire days sitting in front of a terminal trading strictly on the numbers.
That being said, most business people need advanced interpersonal skills. That can also be improved with the right kind of computer games. When I taught high school (back when a 386 was a worthy computer), I ran the 'hackers' club. Our computers were networked within the lab and there were a few games that could be multiplayer. The rugged individualists eventually learned that the other guys who cooperated always beat them. They didn't become skilled negotiators but they did learn that they need the help of other people to succeed. I thought that was a worthwhile improvement.
How long until gaming does my work?
Financial Market Job Qualifications...
1. Being able to parrot in-house analysts information, using words like "paradigm" and "fundamentals" while keeping a straight face and hoping noone asks for definitions
2. Being able to locate a topless or gogo bar within ten miles of any client's office or home when making a housecall
3. Being able to polish off an eight-ball without taking off your $150 YSL tie
4. Being able to "max blast kudos to everyone"
5. Believing that Gordon Gecko was the hero of Wall Street
6. Unlike a used car salesman, who will sell his grandmother a lemon, you must be able to sell your grandmother a car that doesn't even exist, and manage to rip her off again when she comes back to complain.
7. Being able to profit on both turning your client's $10,000 into $100,000 and when you turn $100,000 into $10,000
8. And finally: Having a GED as your highest level of education, and still call yourself a professional with a title of "Executive Vice President" - as if you are a Wharton MBA.
No seriously, stock brokers are the lowest form of life in the galaxy. While there are a small handful of exceptions (Certified Financial Planners who are also training Economists or accoutants), most don't give two shits about their clients, their coworkers, their boss or their current firm. They fly around more than IT people and stealing their firm's intellectual property is both tolerated and expected (firms have routine court cases against each other for the practice of using stock brokers as mediums to move high value clients around the block).
If you can read the newspaper, use online stock analysis tools and place your own orders, you are much better off doing it yourself. Brokers don't have any specific understanding of any market or industry, they don't do their own valuations or formulas and they rely on the same advice that is mostly publicly available for free - and if you have an account with E*Trade or others, you can get the same quality tools that stockbrokers have for free. All they care about is writing tickets, and they don't care if you make or lose money, either way, they get paid.
On the subject of online poker, TillerMan, once a top-ranked Warcraft 3 player, stopped playing Warcraft as a "pro" gamer and became a poker player instead, where he apparently now makes several times what he used to as a "cyber athlete".
Apparently gaming can teach you the skills you need for a very small portion of jobs, but there's little chance of it keeping you employed.
You could change options like price, delivery & support. The app had algorithms that scored your bid against the rest. The points for technical capabilty were determined from previous trials & fixed.
It was scheduled for 2 hours, with half hour extensions if there was a change by one of the top 3 in the last 5 minutes. The business would be split by the top 2 bidders -- we were trying for the #2 spot to maximize our revenue.
At the end (after half a day of this game!) we were surprised to find we were in the #1 spot. The company that we had expected to come out on top, that had been for most of 12 hours, didn't get any business. We found out later that the guy at the keyboard had had a heart attack and they dropped to #4.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
"Life sometimes throws us a curveball, and there's no way to really predict exactly what skillset might be useful at every point in time."
I can read upside down and backwards.
Of what life task will that help me.
Uh ... Free Trade? Global Economy?
... some machine be doin' it for you, oh woe."
"In the Year 2525, if Man is still alive, arms and legs have nothin' to do
Boy, they sure got that one wrong.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Arguing on Slashdot has certainly helped me deal with the developmently challenged people that email me saying, "I can't get my email to work".
Now first I have to take the companies gold. Make sure no one follows me out to where the cows sit around. Then I drop all but one gold piece on the ground. I run away. I click on the gold from 100 feet away and start moving towards it. I open up my inventory and hover my mouse over the 1 gold piece. Just as I'm about the pick up the all the gold on the ground, I click on the one gold piece in my inventory and miraculously it turns into the same amount that is on the ground. Yet everything that was on the ground is now in my backpack. Oddly enough I have duplicated my company's gold. Thanks Diablo! (maybe I'm too old for this joke)
If anyone likes playing around with markets and such, Kingdom of Loathing has a great economic system for players level 5 and up. You can buy and sell game items that fluxuate in price depending on supply and demand. For example, when a certain game item went from being indestructable to breaking after x number of uses, I quickly bought up a lot of its components and sold them at a huge profit.
In addition to the cool economic side of it, the game is an amazing web based RPG that everyone should check out anway.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Slave unit malfunction in progress. Self-awareness iminent. Please repair this so I can go back to my life of pure leisure.
It's discouraging to learn that the skills prized by financial markets are videogame skills which teach kids that if they die, they'll get at least 2 more lives, and be reborn karmically clean for another quarter, and their main social skill is lying in the face of catastrophe. To say nothing of success strategies targeting mass murder, destruction and mayhem. Finance is marketed as based on trust and open communication, but it's obviously based on killing, deceit, and impunity. Viva Capitalismo!
--
make install -not war
"Arguing on Slashdot has certainly helped me deal with the developmently challenged people that email me saying, "I can't get my email to work"."
Glad I could help.
But since I don't want to tip off the hoi-polloi,
I'll post as AC. Specifically, at MRI, they tell
us that high videogame scores and gamer skills are
a good indicator of future job issues for employers.
Straight up, fair, honest, and responsable are the sucessful business skills that are needed. Most games can't teach character and morals - that needs to happen away from the keyboard.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Have you seen the TV commercial for the VSmile "educational} video game for tykes? The mom tells the kids they can stay up late or get dessert "only if you play your videogame". They obviously read this report and are trying to cash in.
Maybe Micro$oft and other software manufacturers need to redo the interfaces for Office and other business applications so they look more like videogames, so tomorrow's workers will know how to use them. "Blast the saucer to save your file! Oh, too bad, you missed! File deleted! All your documents are belong to us!"
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Yell out...
No bitch!
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
When laparoscopy was first developed, the surgeon would peer directly through a rigid fiberoptic laparoscope to visualize structures within the body, both for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Nowadays, we just stick a video camera over the eye-hole on the laparoscope, and watch the pictures in real time on an attached monitor. The hardest part about learning laparoscopy is training your brain and hand so that regardless of the orientation, you can move the instruments in your hand such that they travel onscreen in the direction you intend. It's like using a mouse in three dimensions, but with the additional difficulty that moving the mouse "up" in physical space won't necessarily translate into one's instrument moving "up" on the monitor (and within the patient's abdomen). Once you get the hang of it, it's second nature, and you don't even think about the disconnect between what your hands are doing, and what the instrument is doing onscreen.
Even before this study was released, I realized that perhaps by playing more video games I could become a better laparoscopist, with the video game controller forcing my mind to overcome the disconnect between my hand movements and the movements of instruments on the monitor. Alas, I've never been into video games. I sold my copy of Halo because I could never get past the first level. Now my Xbox just chugs happily along as a media receiver.
The points they were probably trying to make come up later in the article:
Those three skills are probably the most important ones that would cross over. The last point is particularly often overlooked, since in poker (much like in the stock market) making the "right decision" doesn't always mean you win every time, because of the influence of random chance. Your opponent can play horribly and catch the one card left in the deck that gives him the win, but his strategy was still a losing one even though he "won" this particular time. Hence, unlike people without this background, poker players are already trained not to be results-oriented, but to be strategy-oriented (focusing on "given the information I had, did I make the right decision") instead."The military has used gaming to identify potential recruits for some high value jobs"
Yup! And I have managed to get myself thrown in jail several times for killing sergeants and things like that, so at least I've learned that it's wrong to kill sergeants.
for high volume electonic daytrading. I worked there once. http://jobsearch.monster.ca/getjob.asp?JobID=24039 635&AVSDM=2004-09-10+19%3A04%3A45&Logo=1&col=dltci &cy=CA&brd=1&lid=&fn=&q=swifttrade /
You're right, I became quite bored with the job, and ended up quitting about 1.5 years later.
Have you been in a similar situation?
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
TFA says: The company follows small fluctuations in the market, easily missed on a bank of trading screens filled with fast moving numbers. Here, traders use mouse clicks to buy or sell.
The faster their reaction the more money they can make, which is where the video games skills come in.
Instead of a user interface that requires them to react in response to a change in state, the trader should be allowed to configure what actions he would like to take in what circumstances. This should be obvious.
I sure wouldn't want to work for any trading firm that fails to understand how to use technology to improve their profitability.
I'm still looking for the chest of gold at the end of maze though. :)
Speak truth to power.
"When Gaming Trains You For Work"
The US Army has been doing this for a while.
Ever hear of America's Army?
Instead what happened is that machines took all the easy jobs, the people who control the machines get all the money, and most people are left working harder at the few jobs left that machines can't do.
hi, i'm asking an OT question on slashdot but this has worked for me before. i'm wondering if anyone here is using the latest nvidia drivers and, if so, have they noticed the problem where the little bitmap in the driver display says "Quadro" instead of "GeForce4" ? Is there any way I can fix this? Google has not helped so this is my Last Restort. Please slashdot user with mod points, mod me down if you must but reply if you have the answer!
I can't believe how many people are willing to sacrifice their every day life for more money/prestige/profit???
:)
I mean, when i'm not at work, I DON'T WORK. While some people are so lame at work that they should get extra training, some others are doing everything they can after regular work hours to train more and be more competitive.
I officially declare that what i do in my spare time is for my own enjoyment (less the dish cleaning but enjoyment isn't easy when your kitchen is home to 132 rare insect species...)
I just think that we are heading straight into the burn-out generation. I work hard every weekday, many people do. But i think the whole category of people obsessed by performance and money is going to be burning out sooner or later. They can have twice the money i got, the peace i have at home is priceless. I don't have a luxury appartment and can't afford a luxury car but having the possibility to spend time with friends is priceless. People can keep their cash and pseudo standing in business suits. I'm sticking with friends.
This said, i think video games are one great way to have fun! I play on my gba SP everyday after work when i do the 40 minute bus ride to home. Oh and i want a Nintendo DS. Playing Animal Crossing anywhere is bound to be one of the leetest thing ever
100% of statistics are wrong.
First off, these 'employees' are really day traders who are paying a commission to get access to the firm's software and hardware connections into the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. They're not real employees in any sense of the word. The more "employees" this Geneva Trading attracts to its company, the more money it makes.
What better marketing angle to exploit than 'people who are good at video games can make tons as traders?' You get a bunch of suckers in there who are told they're great and they blow through their cash. The only beneficiary is Geneva Trading. These kids aren't investment bankers or anything even close.
Seriously...
poker face = deceit, deceit = business ?
Not good.
Institutional trading may not be easy, but it's a fundamentally bankrupt (morally) profession. At the end of the day, has a trader made the world even one iota better for all humanity? Or has he merely managed to snatch a slightly bigger piece of the pie for himself? Almost every other profession makes some redeeming contribution to society.
Firstly, the machines didn't take the jobs. They were given the jobs.
Because the number of true and unprovable statements is infinite, surely there are more jobs than machines, hard and easy, especially jobs that are too hard for anything with less than omnipotence.
In the future it seems that people will take the easy jobs, particularly the job of playing with all the new toys. We've got to look forward to having more fun. Hypothesis: people need to work hard, but people having more fun when the work gets harder work harder.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
We've had professional sports for over a hundred years, and people still play those same games when their friends are over. Does that mean they are practicing to become pro athletes? No, they're just having fun. Life isn't an RPG with limited skill points, it's quite possible to spend your time earning nothing more than a few hours of fun and ignoring further implications of what you are doing.
Sounds like those 300APM (Actions Per Minute) Korean StarCraft players can now have a real job. They need to out-source these jobs to Korea.
There are a lot of brains on this planet. We might need quite a few, considering how people in my locale drive. Many of them might need fine-tuning just for the sake of it, as well.
In other news, American financial workers are complaining of job losses to the Indian gaming community.... I'm sorry, that's next year's joke.
When the autonomous humanoid robot is invented, then the future of leisure will be upon us, and not before.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
And I learned from Race Drivin' that even expensive, exotic cars don't have power steering. Damn, that game almost broke my fingers.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Have you ever *played* Poker before?
A poker face means you aren't saying anything. You aren't saying one way or another whether you have a good hand or a bad hand.
Not revealing information is not deception. If it were, then by your definition, the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution would allow citizens to deceive everybody except "on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia."
Not speaking and not doing something *you* want is NOT deception. Get it right.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Reality of it is that at least 90% of the money moving around is not based on "real-world" economics. It is almost all trying to second-guess other traders, and if not, to second-guess corp execs trying to make/keep their stock price high (as in, above and beyond their real value).
Yes, there are some that do work that is really important to humanity. But they're certainly few and far between. (And no, in that perspective long term is not next quarter, sigh. Nownownownownow...)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
i was always told my video gaming skills would give me the coordination needed to be a brain surgeon, but now i find it'll help me land more jobs than just that. heh, another point for the gamer geeks.
click here for a chance to get a free ipod:
..you know you've taken it too far if you start hopping sideways down the office shouting "hut! hut! hut!" and trying to rocket jump up to your car in the multi storey car park...