"Skills from Wargaming" Topic

What skills has Wargamming given you or strengthened?
Arriving in a new city and using their public transport system, I benefited from the ability to read the whole instruction. Apparently you "tap on and tap off."..further reading …. Unless you're "on the tram – you only tap on" and if you are in the cbd free travel zone, "you don't need to tap on- or off" 😅.

Playing games has definitely improved my problem solving skills. And running games is good practice for project management

Learning to lose in a magnanimous fashion

Thinking under pressure

Plus it has enhanced my French a lot

Being able to step back and look at the bigger picture, not just the trouble in front of me.

Not spelling then

The ability to differentiate coffee from brush water. Mostly.

Apologies for the spelling.

The game "Paranoia" explained quite clearly to me the truth about life in corporate bureaucracy and the art of survival in the same, and gave me the skills to realize what a farce it all was, and most of all, the joy of sabotage. Oh, that doesn't mean I didn't do my job, or lost the company money, or played politics. What it means is that I learned the following.

When a group (any group, corporation, agency, church, army whatever) fastens on it's own destruction, there is nothing you can do. You cannot reverse, it, halt it, even slow down the rate of decay. The only thing you can do is grease the skids so that it crashes to it's destruction quicker and the work of rebuilding can begin.

Example. Once I was in a management meeting where there was a huge problem-- a veritable disaster. The disaster was none of my making or that of my department and my department would have no role in having to clean it up. I could therefore take a rather detached attitude and step back and amuse myself as to what was the most stupid, worthless, idiotic, and asinine solution to the problem. I though and thought and thought and at last I came up with it. A Solution that would not only solve the problem, but make it worse and create an even greater disaster down the road. But I didn't open my mouth, it was so stupid, so idiotic, so inept that I thought it would get me laughed out of the room. (But it did have the singular advantage that it would stroke and stoke the egos of top brass.

So I remained silent.

Not two minutes later the big boss' drinking buddy suggests it, and it is eagerly and voiceferously adopted by everyone (but me who remained silent).

Well it was soon put in train, yielding an even BIGGER disaster than the one it was meant to cure. The thing had followed the standard course for all such corporate initiatives.

1. Initial enthusiasm.
2. Eventual disillusionment and failure.
3. The search for the guilty. (but you can't punish the guilty because they're you're drinking buddies and sycophants, and it's extremely hard to find a good a** kisser these days) so you go to….
4. The punishment of the innocent. (It's much better to punish those who were trying their hardest, or giving it their all because it's obvious they (wre not just part of the team and didn't give their all to it. And of course however disasterous the project was, it must be termed a success, and if it is a success and you can't punish the guilty, and have already punished the innocent, then you MUST go to the next step…
5. The rewarding of the uninvolved. Which in this case was me, who had done absolutely nothing at all. Please note this wasn't a real reward or any meaningful reward, just a widely trumpeted "attaboy" which everyone knew was a sham, and which if anyone had the slightest doubts about, I quickly enlightened them.

There it is, pure "PARANOIA"

I think wargaming develops a better sense of time and space. If one moves brigade x from point a to point b, will brigade y have time enough to cross the space between it and point a in order to hold the ground previously held by brigade x? Lacking that skill (or failing to apply it) would be bad news.
Bob

Sillypoint
Welcome to Melbourne's public transport system. All those things of which you rightly complain cost us a lot of money.

Skills developed and or improved thanks to wargaming ?
Loads:

Mental arithmetic.
You can't play any wargame without doing some on the spot mental arithmetic to balance all the modifiers that inevitably are applied.
Not unless you spend all the time reading the book which is boring.

I'm the chair of our local council and can do many of the mental calculations faster than any of the other councillors can, even if some of them are sitting there with iPads etc. Ok, I also produce complex spreadsheets, but my mental skills can easily pick up any suspect results for me to check line by line.

Project Management.
Setting up games with 10-15 players on multiple tables held over a day requires venues, catering and other logistics. Plus finances 'cos I'm not paying for all that out of my pocket. Then there is also the issue of managing your own army so you don't blow money on troop type X when you only need a few of them. OK, that may be a skill I haven't quite learnt. ;-)

Research.
Even for Fantasy/Sci-Fi games, you need to read up on what your forces can and cannot do. For historical games, you need even more research and knowledge. You need to work out what are the books/online sources to trust etc.

Artistic endeavours.
You quickly learn about the colour palette you need, the issue of density of pigmentation of the paints you will use, the different ways of using paints (brush, spray, etc), lighting, photography.

Manufacturing/engineering/materials science
Couldn't think of a summary that didn't sound pompous – but we all know that production and then preparing figures/scenery/vehicles all require different approaches using different skills (drilling, gluing, sanding etc).

Manners.
Playing, with honesty.
Losing, with grace.
Winning, without hubris.

initial skill was the quick manipulation of the slide rule.
after that, pretty much what Giles said…….

No criticism just trying to be funny

VW 👍🏼👌🏼😎
Not necessarily appropriate for real world situations- but finding flanks is my default strategy.
Skirmish where they are strongest, hit them where they are weakest.
Seize the most advantageous terrain, sit near the door (so you can exit the meeting first) or near where the line for food will start.
If you are sitting at a random WW2 game, sit on the German side: you may lose the scenario, but you probably will have better equipment and troops, and your Commisar won't need to shoot someone to remove suppression or pin markers.😜

Winning without hubris? Oh, no, I'm a miserable failure! Well, once in a while. Losing with grace? Sure – except when the scenario really s**ked wind. Happens sometimes. Even my own.

Other lessons? Don't care. I play for fun.

Taught me to always pick the army that the rules are named after.

Math

Problem solving and logic

Becoming a good sport and not taking things too seriously

Map reading

Increase in historical knowledge through research

Math, Logic, reading comprehension, speeling…

Other than painting?

Well, RPGing moreso than wargaming (but they have common heritage, of course), really helped my social skills, particularly with regard to small talk. Have to make it all up on the fly has helped me to be able to converse with ease on a variety of subjects with a variety of people. Before D&D, I couldn't talk about anything other than the humanities or Star Wars to save my life.

Wargaming proper has been something of a boon to attention to detail, and tracking multiple things (a rifleman who spends the whole game nestled in some trees isn't much good).