How Victoria 3 Can Prepare You For A Career
Jake from Game Academy
Question: When is a game not a “game”?
Answer: When it is a training ground for economics.
Last month saw the launch of Victoria 3.
Paradox Interactive’s latest grand strategy game is a sandbox economy builder with elements of diplomacy and war. You control a nation’s entire economy from production chains to taxation and trade.
The game requires strong management of a complex combination of resources and production systems.
Every change you make has an impact on the economy - sometimes of multiple countries or empires. If you build a lumber camp, you get more wood but the market price could drop from an excess of resources. This in turn could drop the price of furniture, the income from trade, and the wages of your population, reducing their standard of living and therefore your tax income.
Is this just “a game”? No.
Victoria 3 is an economy simulator that requires players to demonstrate high-level problem solving, resource management and foresight when planning. These are all important, transferable skills in an age of resource and risk management, where companies have to follow aggressive, all-out programmes of growth and Elon Musk bets $44bn on buying the loss-making House of Twitter.
Victoria 3 is of course a fictional world but all the time the game asks you to analyse the impact of your decisions and question whether tradeoffs are worth it.
Is it worth subsidising a raw material to increase production in order to maintain the market price for that resource? Will improving production methods help or hinder your economy? And what are the indirect repercussions for each one of your decisions?
Can and could playing Victoria 3 be applicable to a job you’re applying for? For sure.
Many businesses will value the skills that the game demands and will be looking for concrete examples in a job interview.
Experts say that it’s perfectly acceptable to share the games that you play in an interview. Just make sure to give a brief overview of the context, followed by the skills you have learnt and most importantly how they are transferable to the role. The best strategy? Analyse the job first, then see if and how the game suits.
Image Credit: Rock Paper Shotgun