Why should you hire a Minecraft Gamer for a corporate position
I know we have been talking and hearing about this new age hiring mentality of corporate giants for a few years now. “You don’t need a traditional educational qualification to work with us” is what they say more or less. We even saw that heavy production movie, starring Owen Wilson, created by Google promoting this same ideology. On the other hand, time and again there is someone posting on LinkedIn, crying about the unfair job requirements of companies looking for candidates with over 5 years experience for an Entry Level job while not considering internships as relevant job experience. At this point these two contradicting scenarios have become relatable memes rather than problems that we can tackle. In the middle of all of this depressing banter about jobs and hiring, I came across a game that is has been around for while and is now probably one of the best selling in the gaming community.
In case it wasn’t obvious from the title, I am talking about Minecraft. I can understand the confusion, why am I talking about this 10 year old Indie Game while discussing corporate jobs and hiring trends? Well, if you know anything about Minecraft at all, you may be able to see where I am going with this.
Created by a single game developer with randomness at it’s heart, this open world game is arguably the most successful of it’s kind. Although Notch (Markus Persson), the aforementioned creator, is not associated with the game anymore, the game has successfully achieved what he had initially envisioned: a place where you can create your own world. You can do almost anything in the game. It does have a goal, killing the Ender Dragon, but really that is just optional. So, you can imagine how big the game has to be for that to happen. Its popularity has naturally attracted the biggest names in the industry like Pewdiepie (the most subscribed individual content creator on YouTube) and eventually it became a treasure trove of entertainment culminating some of the most bizarre and creative game-plays I have ever seen.
Considering all this, if I were to put “Minecraft” as a skill on my resume then I highly doubt I would ever be able to land a corporate job. That is a sad truth. I really want to challenge this notion, because the fact is that a Minecraft gamer can offer a lot to a creative or problem solving corporate job given how the person plays the game. Let me give you a better idea of what I am talking about.
The game constraints teach you resource management
So when you start a Minecraft game, depending on the mode you are playing, it randomly generates a seed, which is a small code that governs various aspect of the world. You spawn into the world which could have any sort of terrain: a desert, a woodland forest, a grassy plain, or even a small island in the middle of the ocean (Trust me, that one is not fun). You start off with nothing and all you can do is mine with your bare hands. You can dig up dirt, chop some trees to get wood, then use the wood to create tools like pick-axes and shovels that let you mine other blocks like stone and sand. As you start mining more and more you are able to find rare materials like iron and diamond. You can farm crops in the game, you can tame horses, you can herd sheep and cows and pigs for their resources. If you use your surroundings well, you can store a lot of useful materials in your inventory that will help you progress in the game. This aspect of the game is very similar to resource management at the beginning of any large project. It is very rare that, for a project, you are handed all the different resources properly arranged and sorted. Just like the Minecraft world seed given to the gamer, you may be given a large sum of money at the beginning of the project which basically has everything you need to build something extraordinary. It depends on the Gamer or the Employee to properly manage the resource to achieve the best possible result.
Minecraft has real world problems: like monsters
Isn’t it annoying when you are working on a big e-commerce project and suddenly your main servers get hacked by a ransomware? This is probably the same as a creeper blowing up my wheat farm in Minecraft (maybe not exactly same but you get my point). What is a creeper, you ask? Well a creeper is one of many monsters in the game that spawn out of thin air with just one purpose in their back-end code: to kill you. Zombies, Skeletons, creepers, endermen, witches, raiders and all sorts of other monsters in Minecraft that are quite similar to the real world problems a corporate employee may face while working. You may think that is comparison is a little bit overstretched but wait till you see the disappointment on a Gamer’s face when their villagers are zombified during a raid, or when they lose their diamond pick-axe in a mine-shaft because a skeleton killed them. The similarity is not exactly between the monsters and the problems, instead its between the reactions of the Gamer and the Employee. After losing their assets or getting denied possible achievements, the Gamer and the Employee tackle with an issue that was supposedly beyond their control. Both of them knew from the beginning that the problems and the monsters existed. I hope you understand what I am trying convey here. Just like the real world, Minecraft offers the opportunity to prevent problems and even deal with them once they have created havoc in your lives (real or virtual).
The gods of Minecraft: Redstone Engineers
I know most of the readers may be countering my entire argument by saying, “it’s just a game”, “All these attributes are secondary aspects to major jobs”, “I won’t hire a software developer just because he plays Minecraft”. Well, I’ll admit that my previous points were a bit on the lukewarm side. A lot of games can offer these aspects as well. So let me tell you about something that is the reason for millions of people playing the game.
Remember when I said that beating the Ender Dragon, the supposed end, is optional? Yes, the game is so vast and open that you can virtually build anything. And at the very center of this creative freedom is a special mineral in Minecraft that is used for an insane amount of purposes: Redstone. As the name suggest, this red colored block in Minecraft is basically the equivalent of electricity (not exactly but very close) from the real world. It allows you to transfer signals from one block to another. It can power a lot of tools like sensors, pistons, rails etc. The game is coded in such a way that you can mimic a lot of mathematical and computational concepts of the real world.
You can create logic gates, feedback loops and an incredible amount of automated machines inside Minecraft. Seems cool right? But what is even cooler than this is the way gamers have used Redstone to build some of the most insane creative projects in the world. The usage of Redstone is so open that people have built entire computers inside the game with it. I am not exaggerating, here is the link. This guy built a quad core PC inside Minecraft. If that doesn’t amaze you, this guy built a smartphone capable of video calling INSIDE MINECRAFT.
Do you realize that the fact that if these people can create such crazy things with so many constraints, they could legitimately do 100x more creative things given the right resources in a corporate environment? Why would you not hire such potential? And this is not limited to computational engineering, there are projects that mimic airplanes, robots, guitars and so many other incredible things. I personally love it because of automation, as I am a mechatronics engineer working in the robotics field. I think if you want to learn Industrial Automation, then Minecraft is the best way to enjoy it. I can build entire automated factories churning out 1000 blocks of iron per hour, or I can build automated self sorting systems for my storage. It is absolutely crazy how much you can do in Minecraft and the best part is that people are still finding new and better ways to create amazing things inside this game.
Investigative problem solving: the seed hunter’s sword
Earlier I was talking about world seeds: the small piece of code that governs all the aspects of the randomly generated world. You can call the seed as the virtual unique identification code of the world. This small code can be created with numbers or characters and then converted to an integer type string with an upper-limit of 64-bits. If you do the math correctly, you’ll find that with all the possible combinations of characters used to create the seed, there are roughly 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible Minecraft worlds, that is around 18 Quintilian possibilities. So this means the chances of 2 people getting the world, are virtually improbable. Naturally, certain people just have to achieve the impossible. If you see a famous youtuber like Pewdiepie play Minecraft you may want to get the seed for his world (let me clarify that it doesn’t mean you can enter his Minecraft world where he plays. The game is stored locally so unless you are in his server you can’t really play with him. You can however generate the same world in your PC). But alas due to the improbable chances mentioned above you can’t do it.
Well, you can’t but some people did. A team of seed hunters found the seed code of Pewdiepie’s world. They went down the rabbit hole of minecraft’s seed generation code and created algorithms to screen through 18 Quintilian possible world by process of elimination. The only information they had was from the terrain they saw in Pewdiepie’s videos. It took them several months to do it but they were able to do it. To really explain the gravity of their achievement you need to realize that for a very powerful computer to screen through 18 Quintilian worlds with only limited reference data, it would take several decades. And they did it in months. That says a lot about their investigative problem solving skills that is probably one the most important attributes required in deep data analytics and big data jobs. You can’t always rely on the computer, you need these skills to speed up the process, identify key patterns, screen relevant information when working with data.
If its a game for you then its probably fun
A lot of successful people say that you shouldn’t treat work as a tedious job, rather think of it as a game and you will start having fun. I am not very fond of this statement but it does apply to some people. If these Minecraft gamers started considering their corporate jobs as a hardcore mode game-play, things would probably go really well for them.
There is a lot you can discuss about the hiring mentality and current trends of talent acquisition procedures. I have been on either side of the interview table and I can tell you that most of the times it is a mundane process. People on professional forums have leveraged the desperation of job seekers to create these so called “Interview Hacks” or “Professional Growth Guides”. Some of these articles I read are simply click-baits. On the other hand we have incompetent HR executives and hiring professionals looking for the skill-sets that have nothing to do with the requirements or they simply don’t understand how to hire a great employee. In these discussions most of the times you will come across people who keep repeating the same lines like: “Skills are more important than experience” or “Hire the capable person and not the saturated person” but at the end of the day the debate remains stagnant and we rarely see actual exceptional hiring cases.
Amidst this sad and depressing hiring process if you see someone mention their Minecraft creation then don’t throw their resume in the trash. If you give them a chance you will realize that they could possibly be one the greatest employees you could ever hire. Consequently, my gamer friends don’t be shy and put that Redstone project in your CV. Let the corporate giants know that you defeated the Ender-Dragon using an automated bed explosion device. Trust me, if that recruiter has read this article, they will hire you.
