Gaming may strike you as strictly a form of entertainment, and the vast majority of gamers treat it as such, but there’s a whole lot more to get out of gaming than just a good time. Besides being educational, improving hand-eye coordination and fostering online communities, gaming has a lot to teach business owners.

1. Work should be as fun as a game

Gaming is easily comparable to working. Gamers may look that they’re staring blankly at a screen but what’s happening in their heads tells another story. They are actively, constantly and quickly solving complex problems, applying organizational skills (often on a grand scale) and tackling challenge after challenge with gusto.

These are all traits and experiences you can expect and hope to find in the workplace. In fact, you could say that games are simulators for the skills you need in the real world of business. So, why not meet your employees somewhere in the middle? The concept of gamification can and should be applied to working environments in different ways and on different scales depending on the tasks that need doing.

Gamification makes work more enjoyable, adds an exciting element of competition and challenge and helps relieve stress, which leads us to the next point.

2. Gamers are risk takers

How many attempts did it take you to get past the TV room on the hardest level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? Probably more than a dozen. 50? 100? There’s nothing to be ashamed about. In fact, if, like most people, you struggled through that level, you probably learned something quite valuable: it’s good to take risks and fail.

These kinds of games help employees feel more at ease at their work. True, it’s important that everyone is aware when a foul up could truly be devastating, but for most every-day tasks, you want your employees trying new things, learning from their failures and trying something new. If we walked around the office all day thinking we might destroy the company or get fired for every little thing, we’d never do anything new and we’d never discover a better way of doing things.

In short, gaming encourages innovation.

3. Team players

Gamers (especially strategy gamers) learn some important organizational skills for the workplace. If you can successfully manage a 30-city empire in Civilization, you can probably be trusted to manage a budget or a team of subordinates in the office. But one of those organizational skills in diversity and how to be a team player.

Even single-player games teach this important lesson. Gamers may ultimately be in control of the game but there are always other sources of influence built into the game that players have to account for. In multi-player, the effect is heightened as gamers come together to solve various problems with each playing his or her role.

Gaming is an important tool that teaches all kinds of skills like adaptability. Perhaps most importantly, it encourages players to tackle seemingly insurmountable problems with the kind of energy that every employer wants from his workers. BUFF is just another way to make gaming more valuable by rewarding players with BUFF coins as they play. Who knows? Maybe casual gaming could be a business in-and-of itself one day!