The Soft Skills That Games Can Help You Build

Although you may predominantly think of games as a means of entertainment, that doesn’t mean that they’re without practical worth. If you’re a career-oriented person, gaming in moderation, especially with more traditional board and card games, can be a great way to keep your mind active while unwinding.

What’s more, they can even teach real soft skills that can help you be a more effective force in the workplace. Here are a few skills they build, in particular, as well as examples of the kind of games you should be playing to work on them.

Social Literacy

If you’re looking to work as part of a team, especially as a leader, then it’s just as important to be able to read people as it is to manage your own work. Most competitive games require some degree of social deduction or analysis in order to succeed. Poker is perhaps the best example of this.

By playing with people across a table, you can learn to read body language, facial expressions, and behavioral patterns. It’s not going to make you telepathic, but playing social games like poker can help you practice your skills of both observation and self-regulation that can be highly helpful in business meetings, negotiations, and collaborative work.

Concentration And Focus

Your ability to knuckle down and get through a particular work task or problem can be highly valuable when you’re facing deadlines or dealing with a high-stakes issue in the workplace. Your ability to concentrate deeply on a task and to maintain sustained attention while remaining patient and disciplined can make you a truly stellar worker.

Some games reward precisely this kind of dedication and patience as well, with Sudoku being one of the most accessible and valuable. These puzzles require you to train your mind to stay with a problem and to ignore the noise around you, working step-by-step towards a solution even when the path there might not be immediately clear. It can be great for building your tolerance for detail-oriented, long-term work.

Memory Enhancement

A poor memory can truly sabotage your ability to work effectively as part of any team. Being unable to remember a client’s requests, to recall key information in a meeting, or even to keep track of multiple priorities during the day can see you failing to be the asset that you can be.

There are plenty of games, like Spider Solitaire, that can help you improve your memory. Being able to remember card positions, your previous moves, and different available sequences can help you improve your memory across the board. Your ability to retain and recall information is something that can be directly improved with practice and brain training, and games such as Spider Solitaire allow you to effectively disguise that training as play.

Strategic Thinking

Whether it’s as part of a team or as a leader, you often have to make decisions that will have consequences, be it immediately or down the line. Being able to “game out” to those consequences and to choose the best path available to you in a given situation is what strategic thinking is all about, and it’s also what chess is primarily built upon.

Chess can help you learn to see beyond the moment, to better anticipate the permutations that can occur depending on your move, and to strategize around them accordingly. It’s a high-pressure game that requires flexibility and rewards adapting on the fly. It also teaches you that a single misstep doesn’t ruin anything, so long as you’re able to recalibrate and stay composed.

Mental Agility

When you’re aiming to be as productive as you can, being able to switch from one track in your mind to another can be vital. You might need to switch work tasks quickly or address a new priority or challenge that puts everything else on hold.

Many people can find themselves slow to get into the newly necessary mindset, so practicing with games that nurture mental agility, like Mahjong, can be greatly helpful. Mahjong involves building a winning hand, like poker, but the hands are played over a longer period, meaning that there are more opportunities for you to have to pivot your strategy and react to how other players are acting. That kind of mental agility, in high-pressure situations, can help you think on your feet and switch tracks without panicking.

Playing games is not going to single-handedly boost your career. However, they can play a real role in sharpening the skills that you rely on to succeed in the workplace, making them worth spending a little time on at least.