Latest news with #gameDeveloper
Forbes
23-05-2025
- General
- Forbes
3 Ways ‘Game Theory' Could Benefit You At Work, By A Psychologist
I recently had a revealing conversation with a friend — a game developer — who admitted, almost sheepishly, that while he was fluent in the mechanics of game theory, he rarely applied it outside of code. That got me thinking. For most people, game theory lives in two corners of life: economics classrooms and video games. It's a phrase that evokes images of Cold War negotiations or player-versus-player showdowns. And to their credit, that's grounded. At its core, game theory studies how people make decisions when outcomes hinge not just on their choices, but on others' choices too. Originally a mathematical model developed to analyze strategic interactions, it's now applied to everything from dating apps to corporate strategy. But in real life, nobody is perfectly rational. We don't just calculate; we feel, too. That's where the brain kicks in. According to the 'Expected Value of Control' framework from cognitive neuroscience, we calibrate our effort by asking two questions: When both answers are high, motivation spikes. When either drops, we disengage. Research shows this pattern in real time — the brain works harder when success feels attainable. This mirrors game theory's central question: not just what the outcomes are, but whether it's worth trying at all. Using a game theory lens in a professional setting, then, can be messy and sometimes bring unwanted emotional repercussions. The saving grace, however, is that it's somewhat intuitively patterned and, arguably, predictable. So should you actually apply game theory to your professional life? Yes, but not as gospel, and not all the time. Being too focused on identifying, labeling and trying to 'win' every interaction can backfire. It can make you seem cold and calculating, even when you're not, and it can open the door to misunderstandings or quiet resentment. Put simply, it's important to be aware of how your choices affect others and how theirs affect yours, but it's also dangerously easy for that awareness to tip over into an unproductive state of hyperawareness. Game theory is a legitimately powerful lens — but like any lens, it should be used sparingly and with the right intentions. Pick your battles, and if you're curious how to apply it in your own career, start with clarity, empathy and a telescope and compass. Use these not to dominate the game, but to understand it and play it to the best of your abilities, so everyone wins. There's a popular saying in hustle culture: work smarter, not harder. At first glance, it makes sense — but in elite professional environments, it's a rather reductive and presumptuous approach. The phrase can carry the implication that others aren't working smart or that they aren't capable of working smart. But in high-performing teams, where stakes are real and decisions have impact, most people are smart. Most are optimizers. And that means 'working smart' will only take you so far before everyone's doing the same. After that, the only edge left is consistent, high-quality production — what we generalize as hard work. From a game theory lens, this type of hard work essentially increases your odds. Overdelivering, consistently and visibly, skews the probability curve in your favor. You either become impossible to ignore, or highly valuable. Ideally, aim for both. And here's where the real move comes in: assume the same of others. In most multiplayer games, especially online ones, expecting competence from your opponents forces you to play better. It raises the floor of your expectations, improves collaboration and protects you from the trap of underestimating the consequences of your actions. Take chess, for example. In a large study of tournament players, researchers found that serious solo study was the strongest predictor of performance, even more than formal coaching or tournament experience. Grandmasters, on average, had put in nearly 5,000 hours of deliberate study in their first decade of serious play. This is about five times more than intermediate players. This is why in a game of chess between one grandmaster and another, neither player underestimates the other. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder My friend told me he rarely applies game theory outside of code. But the more he talked about his work, the more obvious it became that the man lives it. He's been into video games since he was a child, and now, as an adult, he gets paid to build what he used to dream about. Sure, he has deadlines, targets and a minimum number of hours to log every week — but to him, those are just constraints on paper. What actually drives him is the intuitive thrill of creation. Everything else is background noise that requires calibration, not deference. This is where game theory can intersect with psychology in an actionable way. If you can identify aspects of your work that you uniquely enjoy — and that others may see as tedious, difficult or draining — you may have found an edge. Because in competitive environments, advantage is often about doing the same amount with less psychological cost. In game theory terms, you're exploiting an asymmetric payoff structure, where your internal reward is higher than that of your peers for the same action. When others see effort, you feel flow. That makes you highly resilient and harder to outlast. It's also how you avoid falling into the trap of accepting a Nash equilibrium. This is a state where each person settles on a strategy that feels rational given everyone else's, even if the group as a whole is stuck in mediocrity. No one deviates, because no one has an incentive to, unless someone changes the underlying payoff structure. For example, imagine a team project where everyone quietly agrees to put in just enough effort to get by, no more, no less. It feels fair, and no one wants to overextend. But if even one person realizes they could stand to gain by going above that baseline, they have an incentive to break the agreement. The moment they do, the equilibrium collapses, because now others are pressured to step up or risk falling behind. In a true equilibrium, each person's strategy is the best possible response to what everyone else is doing. No one gains by changing course. However, when your internal motivation shifts the reward equation, you may begin to question the basis of the equilibrium itself. Be aware, in any case, that this is a tricky situation to navigate, especially if we contextualize this from the point of view of the stereotypical kid in class who reminds their teacher about homework. Even if the child acts in earnest, they may unintentionally invite isolation both from their peers and, sometimes, from the teachers themselves. This is why the advice to 'follow your passion' often misfires. Unless there's a clear definition of what constitutes passion, the advice lands as too vague. A more precise version is this: find and hone a valuable skill that energizes you, but might drain most others. There's a certain kind of professional who doesn't chase money for money's sake. Maybe he writes code for a game studio as a day job, writes blogs on the side and even mentors high school kids on their computer science projects. But this isn't so much about padding his lifestyle or building a mountain of cash. What he's really doing is looking for games: intellectually engaging challenges, satisfying loops and rewarding feedback. In a sense, he's always gaming, not because he's avoiding work, but because he's designed his life around what feels like play. This mindset flips the usual money narrative on its head. And ironically, that's often what leads to sustainable financial success: finding personal fulfillment that makes consistent effort easier for you and everyone around you. In game theory, this is a self-reinforcing loop: the more the game rewards you internally, the less you need external motivation to keep showing up. So instead of asking, 'What's the highest-paying path?' — ask, 'Which games would I play even if I didn't have to?' Then, work backward to find ways to monetize them. This does two incredibly valuable things in tandem: It respects the system you're in, and it respects the goals you personally hold dear. While game theory maps workplace social behavior reasonably well, constantly remaining in a heightened state of awareness can backfire. Take the Self-Awareness Outcomes Questionnaire to better understand if yours is a blessing or a curse.
Top Gear
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Top Gear
The secrets behind a Forza Horizon world map: Playground Games spills all
Gaming The open world racing developer has a unique talent for building worlds - here's how Skip 8 photos in the image carousel and continue reading November 2021. Nearly two years after the coronavirus pandemic began, the general public has adjusted to a very different pace of life in which their bins go out more often than they do. We're all thoroughly sick of banana bread and Joe Wicks YouTube workout sessions. We did pub quizzes every Friday on Zoom for a bit, until our whole family fell out over the scoring. It's been a long time since we went anywhere exotic, so Google Maps has become our favourite source of entertainment. And then it arrives: Forza Horizon 5 's verdant, sun-kissed Mexico. The automotive holiday destination we were all so desperately in need of, delivered by a game developer with a singular knack for condensing vast and varied areas into one remarkable vehicular round trip. Advertisement - Page continues below As Forza Horizon 5 makes its way to PS5 with all the post-launch content bells and whistles it's amassed since those covid days, lead game designer David Orton and art director Don Arceta have a moment to reflect on a place they created where over 45 million players have since visited. And maybe even share the recipe for the studio's secret sauce. ' It is like the ultimate magic trick,' says Arceta. 'Whenever we approach selecting a location, it's a big process. It's almost like choosing a location for the Olympics.' You might like There are few factors to consider before the team sticks a pin on a map and starts modelling either palm trees or icicles: 'Are there iconic roads that you experience in different in a particular country? Is there a new ecosystem or biome [to the series] there? What is the car culture like in that country? What seasons do they have? What unique weather do they have?' Over the course of five games, the regions which ticked those boxes have been southern France in Horizon 's 2012 series debut, then Colorado in the 2014 sequel. Things seem to dial up a notch or two for Horizon 3 's depiction of Australia in 2016, though. Not only was the game engine capable of humbling just about every other competitor for vehicle and scenery fidelity, it also built a heck of a world map. Advertisement - Page continues below One round trip around the outer perimeter of the environment takes about 10 minutes. In that time, you transition from beach to sleepy surf town to dense rainforest, out into the sun-beaten red soil of the outback, back into the jungle, and then into a massive urban conurbation complete with Skyscrapers and precariously placed al fresco dining. It shouldn't make any sense at all - you're probably covering an area equivalent to the A19 ring road around York, but the layout is designed to let you suspend your disbelief and enjoy an epic adventure. With the addition of a changing seasons mechanic in 2019's Horizon 4 , the United Kingdom provided a perfect venue. Here, if anywhere, it makes sense that the roads would be under blue skies one week, and sheet ice the week after. Horizon 4 packed an incredible variation of country lanes, motorways, quaint villages and big cities into its map, so the bar was set very high for the fifth game. In the end, it all came down to a Volkswagen Beetle. ' We eventually work it down to a short list of about five locations,' says Arceta. And ultimately choice five was Mexico. It was the diversity there that really sold us. And there's a cultural element which we didn't really dig into in past Horizon games, so we leaned into that with our Vocho stories.' The Beetle occupies a unique place in Mexican culture, ubiquitous in both its factory floors and roads since the early Sixties, and subsequently customised for every possible discipline, surface, and purpose. That gave Playground a unique hook. A set of driving missions in its Vocho Stories that would only make sense in this one particular setting. Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox. Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox. ' When we're having these discussions,' says Orton, 'it's really inspiring the design team what kind of experiences from a gameplay perspective we can put into it. 'So with Mexico being so diverse that led to this campaign about expeditions where you go to these areas and you set up festival outposts in these different regions, that campaign drive to go and experience the diversity of this map.' It's a process that goes deeper than identifying places that look pretty and have roads, then. It's striking that Playground works art first, and uses the characteristics of that area to inform gameplay. 'We are looking at it definitely from an art perspective,' says Orton. "And then that gives us energy and we start brainstorming: 'Okay, well there's this new region that we've never had before. What could we do there?' And then away we go. You get a small idea and then suddenly you're making a campaign.' There are technical aspects to consider too. As their game engine evolves and unlocks the potential to render scenery, lighting or weather in new ways, the team looks for opportunities there. The volumetric lighting and particle technology levelled up a lot for Forza Horizon 5 , which gave Arceta and the team the chance to add spectacular dust storms to the mix of weather events. Of course, Google Maps will only get you so far. At some point, you have to put the reference books down and go out on a field trip. The pandemic made that harder than usual for Playground during Horizon 5 's development, but where possible the team did visit Mexico to capture photography and experiences that would inform the art, design and open world map. The ultimate barometer for whether the team has succeeded in building their take on a location is whether players just drive around without an objective. Which of course is a core activity in Horizon 5 's Mexico, and something that Orton, Arceta and the wider team see as strong evidence that their hard work paid off. Four years later, the allure of Mexico's roads hasn't dulled. It's going to be tough to top that location in subsequent games. Then again, they say that at the end of every Olympics too, don't they?
