The Federal Aviation Administration Hires 2000 Gamers
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration had hired over 2000 people from a gaming campaign they started back in April.
By Roald Van Buuren
The FAA has become one of the first large parties to realize the Power of Gaming as a way of of identifying capabilities that traditional education struggles to teach. Skills such as spatial awareness, multitasking, strong decision-making, sustained attention, and managing complexities under pressure are all normal for gamers, but not so much for the average person.
In my opinion, the most interesting thing here isn't about that games teach people these things, it's that it create environments where we can observe them, learn from them, and use it for real-world impact that goes way beyond entertaining.
Gaming isn't like a survey or a CV where someone claims they are good under pressure or with complexities; gaming can show these things directly in data. How quickly does someone react, what decisions did they make, what risk did they take, how did they adapt when a situation changed, how did they respond when they failed? The data in gaming tells you exactly what people do when they are making decisions, rather what they say they'd do.
There is also a real opportunity here for esports, as competitive players are making these decisions in-game, and they're doing it repeatedly, against other humans, under extreme pressure (think million dollar prize pool and 10,000 fans in front of you), with outcomes that can be measured. We can see how a player responds when they are winning, losing, behind, ahead, under time pressure, or facing an opponent doing something unexpected.
The application here is the FAA finding people who might make good air traffic controllers which is a real win and opportunity, but I think we are going to see much bigger applications of this idea.
Once you can understand how decision-making happens in-game, you can start looking if those patterns can help us understand how people perform in the real world, and give them better tools to improve outcomes.
And this is where I think gaming becomes much more than an entertainment platform. If we can collect enough behavioural data, we can start building models of how people make decisions under different conditions, and eventually use those models to simulate and improve decision-making outside the game.