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Wow this is exactly what I've been looking for. It also ties together what I've been working out in my head. I'm in a similar situation as OP but its worse beca

by jwdunne 13y ago

Wow this is exactly what I've been looking for. It also ties together what I've been working out in my head. I'm in a similar situation as OP but its worse because I am not great, haven't done great things and I'm stuck in the same low-paying PHP CRUD developer job. The difference is I'm not afraid to admit it. I do practice and learn a lot but never built anything substsbtial. My current problem is with Civ5. It's hands down the best game I've played. One thing I enjoy doing is building extremely strong economies above anything else. When I'm raking, I notice it doesn't take much to swing in the direction I want to go. When starting out, you can only really increment gold per turn by 1 to max 7. I often wonder is there any of this I can apply to my real life situation? Can I model my income like a civ 5 economy? Maybe I can say x, y and z will increase the amount of £ I receive per day. Perhaps per hour so it's closer to a game.

larksimian 13y ago
tldr: Gaming is like calorie free sweetener, a job is like a (sometimes bland) hunk of roasted meat. If you focus exclusively on 'fake' achievements you might quite literally end up starving. What job would you like to have? What do job ads for that post require in terms of technical skills and provable ability? What are some people that have jobs of that sort and what are they able to code, what technologies do they know, what is their work process? Where are you in comparison with people whose career you would like to emulate? Avoid "I'm bad they're good" use more specific language: "They can write full stack PHP CMS-lite apps and deploy them to AWS with chef and manage all Ops tasks associated with keeping that app functional." That's still vague but it gives you a list of research goals and some clear, real world ways to test that you've achieved them. Get yourself closer to that person's level of knowledge, as you advance adjust your current summary of skills and experience and upgrade jobs. Write your own skill/tech tree and monitor where you are on it. See http://www.dungeonsanddevelopers.com/ http://www.dungeonsanddevelopers.com/ for inspiration, though I think it's not that well themed(who cares about +10 strength, where do I record the +10% Bash Script writing speed I gained last week?) On a more philononsense note: Games are awesome because you get to achieve your goals. They are pavlovian systems optimized to tickle the part of our brains that enjoys creating a desire and then satisfying that desire. Life is fundamentally about uncertainty. No model of your career path and the value of your labor is going to get within the ballpark of Civ's precision. Single player against the AI at lower difficulties you can have strategies that will win you the game every time, deterministically. With life there are just too many variables to make such strong predictions. Imagine trying to think of a good strategy for winning a 50,000 game-year long Civ game, with a technology tree that's not set in stone(both in terms of the tree and in terms of each node) so investments made in a prior game might have different effects if made in this one. The tech tree is also 50 times larger. That's an encyclopedia just to get a grasp on what it is! Plus undiscovered nodes are oftentimes clouded in fog of war! Plus paths sometimes snap while you're on them due to the AI researching a different branch! Fundamentally the pleasure of a game is that it gives you goals to strive for that are achievable and that you achieve constantly and steadily. Life will never give you that certainty of 'leveling up'. BUT! remember that game achievments, unless you are actually a pro gamer, produce no value for those around you and no value, beyond happiness hormones, for you. It's quite literally a behavioral drug, mimicking useful human behavior.

by jwdunne 13y ago

larksimian 13y ago

tldr: Gaming is like calorie free sweetener, a job is like a (sometimes bland) hunk of roasted meat. If you focus exclusively on 'fake' achievements you might quite literally end up starving. What job would you like to have? What do job ads for that post require in terms of technical skills and provable ability? What are some people that have jobs of that sort and what are they able to code, what technologies do they know, what is their work process? Where are you in comparison with people whose career you would like to emulate? Avoid "I'm bad they're good" use more specific language: "They can write full stack PHP CMS-lite apps and deploy them to AWS with chef and manage all Ops tasks associated with keeping that app functional." That's still vague but it gives you a list of research goals and some clear, real world ways to test that you've achieved them. Get yourself closer to that person's level of knowledge, as you advance adjust your current summary of skills and experience and upgrade jobs. Write your own skill/tech tree and monitor where you are on it. See http://www.dungeonsanddevelopers.com/ http://www.dungeonsanddevelopers.com/ for inspiration, though I think it's not that well themed(who cares about +10 strength, where do I record the +10% Bash Script writing speed I gained last week?) On a more philononsense note: Games are awesome because you get to achieve your goals. They are pavlovian systems optimized to tickle the part of our brains that enjoys creating a desire and then satisfying that desire. Life is fundamentally about uncertainty. No model of your career path and the value of your labor is going to get within the ballpark of Civ's precision. Single player against the AI at lower difficulties you can have strategies that will win you the game every time, deterministically. With life there are just too many variables to make such strong predictions. Imagine trying to think of a good strategy for winning a 50,000 game-year long Civ game, with a technology tree that's not set in stone(both in terms of the tree and in terms of each node) so investments made in a prior game might have different effects if made in this one. The tech tree is also 50 times larger. That's an encyclopedia just to get a grasp on what it is! Plus undiscovered nodes are oftentimes clouded in fog of war! Plus paths sometimes snap while you're on them due to the AI researching a different branch! Fundamentally the pleasure of a game is that it gives you goals to strive for that are achievable and that you achieve constantly and steadily. Life will never give you that certainty of 'leveling up'. BUT! remember that game achievments, unless you are actually a pro gamer, produce no value for those around you and no value, beyond happiness hormones, for you. It's quite literally a behavioral drug, mimicking useful human behavior.