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Gaming: Potion count versus server moves? Can we take the Eye of the Beholder around the water cooler?
Thu, 08 Jan 2009

Doing software development for a living means a lot of planning -- design work for the software, project planning to ensure dependancies come together, module and system integration strategies, testing and variance management, economics to plan the cost of various options and so on. During a recent session we sat around a table with a plethora of budget sheets arrayed before us .. this or that option, bundles of options by timeline, what we really want to push or not, and it occurred to me that all printed sheets with numbers scratched and appended and erased and lines all over linking things together .. just looked like Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, or "SSD" ship description and damage sheets for Starfleet Battles Tabletop games.

It wandered into my head that perhaps all those thousands of hours spent as a kid planning a D&D campaign or designing scenarios for massive fleet to fleet balanced wars might have been useful. You know, balancing an encounter between two 15+ ship fleets including frigates and battlecruisers, drone launchers and fighters, stealthed or agile ships versus dreadnoughts and allowing for effects of a Nebula or asteroid field .. thats nothing to shake a bag of Doritos at. How different is planning to take along so many pack horses laden with healing potions and speed boosters and spell components so you can handle the boss in the third plane, to figuring our the risk in relocating an old server or planning license counts for CPUs for a database?

Sure on the one hand, you could argue all that practice was useful, or on the other you could argue that the types of people who play those sorts of highly technical tabletop games are predisposed to that sort of work. Whatever.

Modern gaming has long left tabletops in the dust (there are some grand stalwart titles, and even a rising popularity in family games like Monopoly and Scrabble), but perhaps they all serve as more than just an idle amusement or passtime challenge.. perhaps all these online spreadsheet games (EVE Online) and time grinders (World of Warcraft) are good training for the toils of living, and possibly even help people in their time management, helping train (or damage) sharp minds.

Yeah yeah, get back to work! God, I'm such a nerd.

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