Recently, a trend has emerged. Many of the world’s most successful business leaders are also apparently gamers. For example, Elon Musk has confessed that he’s played multiple games, including Elden Ring, Civilization, Path of Exile, and Diablo 4. Mark Zuckerberg was also a fan of Civilization, Larry Page will often go to LAN parties with Elon Musk. Even Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, is a top-ranked Tetris player and was one of the best at the game back in the day.
But why is it that so many of these great tech leaders who built fantastic companies were also gaming prodigies in their own right? Why does Elon Musk still boast about his exploits in Quake Deathmatch nearly thirty years later?
That’s the topic of this guide. We look at why some of the most successful business leaders of all time are also gamers.
It was their generational culture
Many of the current crop of business leaders are older millennials and Gen Xers. They grew up in the heyday of video gaming during the 1980s and 1990s.
Many leaders found that the base games themselves were a lot of fun, but they also wanted to get into modding and coding hacks. This normalized the idea of risk-taking while also inspiring their digital fluency. For example, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind is famous for creating the first theme park simulator in the mid-1990s. It was just a part of what people of that generation were doing who were interested in tech.
It sparks innovation and problem-solving
Another benefit and reason why so many top CEOs and entrepreneurs play video games is that it improves their problem-solving skills. If you listen to somebody like Elon Musk talk, all he talks about is the benefits of problem-solving for his businesses.
Games force problem-solving in real-time, because they’re challenging and constantly changing. This is a transferable skill that can be brought over into the business space. For example, Elon Musk realized that his vehicles needed intuitive interfaces to really engage drivers. Gaming partially influenced his decisions to give the Tesla a large single-panel screen with a high-definition interface because he understood the benefits of proper UI. This isn’t something that engineers at European car makers have experience with, which is why the latter often seem clunky.
Provide stress relief
Another obvious point is that gaming provides stress relief, which is something that business leaders really need. According to Elon Musk, he works between 80 and 100 hours per week. That’s a lot of time to be working. However, video games give him a way to de-stress and unwind, especially over the holidays, completely changing his outlook.
This ability to reduce stress through gaming is absolutely critical. For many business leaders, it actually sharpens their focus and reduces burnout. In some cases, it can also spark creativity, especially if video game ideas can transfer over to their products and services.
Stress relief from video games improves decision-making and reduces the risk of decision fatigue setting in. Many entrepreneurs and leaders who play video games are able to completely forget about their businesses, allowing those executive function parts of the brain to rest.
Enhances teamwork
Another real benefit of gaming is that it enhances teamwork. Many business leaders find that it’s useful for helping them to resolve conflicts and coordinate with other people.
This is one of the reasons why so many business leaders become tanks in multiplayer online games, or medics in shooters. They want to be able to support the entire field of play instead of just being a single actor.
There are also multiple examples of highly successful people and leaders using games to boost their skills. For example, President Obama is famous for playing problem-solving games with his daughter to enhance both of their abilities. The same is true of the US military, which uses gaming for strategy training.
Fosters resilience
Entrepreneurs and business leaders also use games as a way to foster their resilience. Constantly failing is a good life lesson, especially when trying to succeed in difficult industries like tech.
At the same time, many of today’s tech leaders grew up in a world where constant failure in video games was normal. Anyone who’s ever played spider solitaire online will know the feeling. Most games of the 80s and 90s were very difficult to complete. Getting through them in their entirety was a real achievement.
Ultimately, this sort of persistence is what’s required for leadership skills. Leaders in these games develop the temperament to be able to thrive under difficult and challenging conditions.
Builds quick decision-making
Another factor is that video games improve the speed of decision-making, which is another lesson that’s important for business leaders to learn. Business leaders constantly need to make decisions, as we’ve already mentioned. Video games simply amplify this ability and make it easier for them to do their jobs. For example, Stanford University has done research that shows that leaders who play e-sports games can rapidly adapt to changes in their environment and dominate. This may explain why Elon Musk has been so radically successful in multiple fields during the course of his career.
Enables long-term planning
Perhaps the final and biggest reason why so many successful business leaders are gamers is that it helps them with long-term planning. Creating a business is something that takes multiple steps over many months and years. Creating an empire from scratch requires thousands of micro-decisions and different types of decision-making depending on the stage of the business. What a founder does during the first three months is very different from what that same person does after ten years of constructing something that’s become more established.
Long-term planning is also a feature of many real-world empire-building games. For example, in Civilization, you have to start small and then get the flywheel going before your empire can become larger. You also have to make many difficult decisions at the start before you can really accelerate and dominate at the end.
