What City Builder Games Like Surviving Mars Can Teach Us About Effective Management
I started playing the city builder, or more specifically, the Mars colonization game Surviving Mars in the early days of the pandemic. I had been promoted to a middle management position at the company I was working for at the time only three months before the full-blown effects of the pandemic hit Western Europe. As a digital enterprise, we had a sudden temporary spike in demand while the world was going into lockdown. As a newly minted manager, it was a very challenging situation to deal with, and to wind down in the solitary evenings, I took to an old hobby of mine: gaming. Why not escape to the barren surfaces of Mars while our world grinds to a halt?
It was all good an well at first, but as I got a few hours into the game, a feeling of similarity came to me, and I got up to ask myself: why the heck am I playing this game? It’s effectively emulating what I’ve been doing all day at work. That’s where I began to see how brilliantly the game’s mechanics were emulating management best practices. Below are the points that stood out to me the most.
Before we get into it, please note that “colonist” can be used interchangeably with “team member” in most of the described cases below, and “colony” roughly translates to “business.”
