Game in the Brain

I use a lot of my work skills in my games. 

I do Requirements Gathering and apply Interpersonal and Team Skills in meetings and stakeholder and requirement analysis, and apply Expert Judgement.

It makes me not fit in – it causes my two Work and Game blogs to overlap a lot: Game in the Brain and Trying to Game work. 

 To me Project Management is a TRPG but with higher stakes and less catharsis, I only get to take the experience of success and failure with me to the Table and live out how else this project could have turned out if I had different or more agency and resources at my disposal. 

Every project or milestone is this hidden GM roll where I dont know what really happened and will this be a recurring NPC or Event I have to juggle in the future. 

I look at the PMBOK, BPM CBOK, BABOK etc as extensions of GURPS horror by Kenneth Hite, GURPS mysteries of Lisa J. Steele, Never Unprepared, and all such gaming structure books. 

My 2015 TRPG concept repository is still growing and iterating, but not at the rate of it initially. Experimentation and Practice has limited my options – as I found strategies that work and used to Improve my conditions I have come to rely on these and do not have the bandwidth to learn new things. I seem to cannot explore the unknown well because it is too costly. The Paradox of – I learned something that WORKS, I use it, and cannot find time to learn other things. I have my ANKI deck showing me the limits of my memory as I see my forgetting curve real time every day. 

So this is why the older guys are having a hard time learning new stuff. We have a capacity of holding only a limited number of successful strategies. To maintain the Cognitive Dissonance of the Limits of our Strategies – abstaining from the Koolaid – is the hardest thing. To remember who we were before we build these successful strategies requires the self-torture to have documented all the failed strategies – but the kindness to be forgiving to that more ignorant self.   

I have become dependent on the younger generation to teach me new things.