The better you play Civilization, the better your managerial skills, study says
Strategy games require certain managerial skills from players, and it has been proved by a research project. This study shows that participants who had higher skill in Civilization V were better at problem solving and organizing.
Civilization V
The study titled “Good gamers, good Managers? A proof-of-concept study with Sid Meier’s Civilization” published in 2020. It was recently spotted on Reddit and is available on Springer for free.
A group of researchers used Civilization to find out whether strategy games are “indicative of managerial skills and, if so, of what managerial skills.”
- Fifty German-speaking business students volunteered to participate in the research project. Their average age was 24.1 years, with 75% of them being male.
- Participants were offered a copy of Civilization V (with add-ons) and the chance to win one of six prizes, including a notebook, tablet computer, and a Civilization board game.
- They had one month to learn how to play Civilization V, with ten of them later asking to be withdrawn from the study.
- The researchers organized 10 four-hour multiplayer matches, each of them included four participants under anonymous Steam accounts and usernames.
- All of them played as George Washington on the Pangea map, with the difficulty being set at the Emperor level.
- After that, participants were also offered to take a series of assessments to measure their managerial skills.
Key findings
- The study suggests that games like Civilization can be used to assess problem-solving and organizing skills.
- “Collecting and analyzing data from strategy video games can offer useful insights for profilers and recruiters in the search for talent,” the researchers concluded.
- Strategy games can also be used to assess interpersonal and other managerial skills.
- “We find that students who had high scores in the game had better skills related to problem-solving and organizing and planning than the students who had low scores,” the study reads.
- It also suggests that players’ behavior in in-game chats correlates with their communication skills.
