Hi there.

Over the last few episodes, we have learned a lot about the career of progamers. In this piece, we discuss job career development of professional players; the pros and cons, and how to become one. The article also highlights an interesting piece of data (graph).

[DISCLAIMER]: The article is written for my weekly newsletter, and published on my website.

Happy reading.
Christian

priyanka28

3 Posts

August 15 2024 15:43 GMT

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PurE)Rabbit-SF

United States605 Posts

August 18 2024 15:19 GMT

That is an interesting piece!

I can relate a lot of things you described in your article, especially how it easy to sink in hours in game grinding. But it's a different thing to be studying, or actually improving in video games.

On the part playing career is hard to transfer skill to a traditional job I would disagree in some sense. While it is not obvious , but there are definitely key learning you can take away just as any competitive sport would offer a kid who have gone through it. I feel like video game would be such a great tool to teach kids how to work together team work, teaching resilience, communication, work ethic, and how to improve, giving proper feedback to co-worker under high pressure.

I feel like this whole part is not being properly navigated so far, it feels like a gold mine waiting to discovered.

ShibaT

Germany10 Posts

August 18 2024 15:22 GMT

"The skills needed to be a professional player aren't really valuable outside the gaming industry"

If you are a professional fortnite player, I agree.

ImbaTosS

United Kingdom1666 Posts

August 19 2024 09:42 GMT

Yeah that's interesting. I did a similar thing on musicians actually as a bit of a data project. Same deal basically, incomes massively weighted to the very low, with a few exceeding that and even fewer doing very well. But incomes were so low on average that I couldn't train a ML model (just a simple regression model) to predict the higher incomes at all. They basically always predicted very low incomes for any of the subjects, which is to say it was very hard to determine what if anything would actually predict a successful musician, at least from the data I had which was fairly extensive.

And this was all when I was weighing whether to return to music full-time or keep going ahead with a standard career. Though I decided to push ahead as a musician anyway, the project helped me very much to set realistic expectations which if done correctly is a good thing.

Where I think this sort of information can be unhelpful is when it's used as an argument for why you should never attempt such a path, just based on odds of material success. I've had a lot of that kind of advice in my life and it has not helped me to be a happier, more self-confident person. Only to be confused about what life is supposed to be about and what I'm supposed to do. I would always encourage people to spend their lives, as much as possible, doing what brings them a sense of meaning, purpose and self, as long as they can do so with the level of security and lifestyle that they need. And that's both highly situational, and personal. This sort of information can be a great help in that.

TrAiDoS

Germany135 Posts

August 20 2024 18:31 GMT

On August 19 2024 00:19 PurE)Rabbit-SF wrote:
That is an interesting piece!

While it is not obvious, but there are definitely key learning you can take away just as any competitive sport would offer a kid who have gone through it. I feel like video game would be such a great tool to teach kids how to work together team work, teaching resilience, communication, work ethic, and how to improve, giving proper feedback to co-worker under high pressure.

I feel like this whole part is not being properly navigated so far, it feels like a gold mine waiting to discovered.

Hey there

Happy you enjoyed the article, and I appreciate the feedback.

I haven't seen any study on it yet indicating that gaming-related skills are transferable outside of it. However, I have seen multiple studies suggesting that they don't.
However, I'm currently working on an article that looks at the connection between gaming skills and surgical skills. That episode will probably come out on next week's Sunday.

Best,
Christian

TrAiDoS

Germany135 Posts

August 20 2024 18:37 GMT

On August 19 2024 18:42 ImbaTosS wrote:
Yeah that's interesting. I did a similar thing on musicians actually as a bit of a data project. Same deal basically, incomes massively weighted to the very low, with a few exceeding that and even fewer doing very well. But incomes were so low on average that I couldn't train a ML model (just a simple regression model) to predict the higher incomes at all. They basically always predicted very low incomes for any of the subjects, which is to say it was very hard to determine what if anything would actually predict a successful musician, at least from the data I had which was fairly extensive.

Music (or arts in a broader sense) are a very special field in many regards. However, in almost all domains I know you'd find pareto distributions. A tiny amount of people make the most money, in music a small fraction of artists (in each genre) are the most played on the radio, are streamed etc. Just think about pop, classical music etc. There are maybe 5-10 artists/groups "everyone" knows and then the rate of "success" falls sharply. That type of distribution can be found everywhere.

Music, however, is also special because it's generally a high risk, high reward domain. Either you make it big or you can barely scrape by (unless you do something else on the side like teaching). At least from my experience.

Best,
Christian