I saw a banner in a bus I was on one day, and it was advertising education programs you can take as a gamer. One of the suggested jobs was accounting, which is what I do for a living. At first I was like "That's cool; I'm in the right line of work." But the analyst in me had to dissect this and correlate accounting to gaming. I've been gaming for almost 25 years, and I'm only 29. How was accounting the right fit for me? Well, for some time after seeing that advertisement, I decided to analyze my job functions and see where gaming has contributed to my doing my job better.
Muscle Memory
Muscle memory in gaming works when you're trying to learn a new move or learn a combo in a fighting game. Let's take Smash Bros. Melee & Project M. Melee introduced us to wave-dashing, which takes practice & muscle memory to perform. Once you get a feel for the inputs & timing, you're golden. It's like riding a bike. How do I use muscle memory at work? Well, as an accounting coordinator, I'm more used to crunching numbers than words. So I use the numeric keypad a lot. I get a rhythm when entering accounts in our accounting system. Kind of like that "rhythm" when wave-dashing. It's because of this, I have somehow managed to memorize most of the chart of accounts. There aren't many accounts I have to look up, but that's mostly due to lack of use. Then I'm committed to memorizing that and adding it to my memory bank.
Focus
This took me a long time to figure out at my job. I realized the only environment where I can focus on the task at hand and drown out any distractions is when I'm playing, especially during boss fights. So, I tried an experiment. I downloaded boss music and brought it to work to help me focus on an intense task (depreciation using 3 programs). I put on some Fire Emblem boss music to help me focus, and I treated the whole task as a boss fight. I just hunkered down and focused on that. I now have tons of gaming music on my computer and use it to help me focus at work. Not all of it is boss music, though ;)
Demand for Perfection
Video games, particularly the older ones, demanded perfection from the player. I remember old NES games, Mega Man being particular guilty of this, where pixel-perfection was key for either crossing chasms or obtaining items. What I mean by pixel-perfection, in this context, is that one would have to jump on a platform in such a way that they would have to edge out to the most extreme edge before falling off before jumping to the next platform. Perfection was demanded in the most minute way. In my work, I book all transactions with a roughly 30-character-or-less story behind it. For certain types of transactions, especially ones that I know need clearing soon, I purposely look up the previous instance of the transaction and use the exact, character-for-character, description so that, when I go to download detail and sort by Description, one can easily see that both parts of the transaction cleared. Stuff like this helps me track things that haven't cleared or don't clear properly in full. I do a lot of character counting in my job to meet system restraints. And if I type in the wrong description and it's posted and I can't go back, I will use the same wonky description so I can see it clears. I know, I do my job in a weird way. But it works. It more than pays for itself later on.
This is all that I could come up with so far that helps me see how gaming and accounting can coexist. I hope this was enjoyable for you to read as it was for me writing it.
O Dog
