The Career Game Loop

3Professional Pathfinder and Job Feel

3.1 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Study magic at the College of Winterhold or poetry at the Bards College. Become a hitman for the Dark Brotherhood, or enlist in the Imperial Army. These are just a few of the professions you can pursue in the titanic, open-world game Skyrim.

When playing the game, some diehard completionists will chase down all 273 of its quests, but most players have scarce time. They pick and choose the missions that suit them best.

The real world magnifies both extremes of this experience. In life, there are even more professions available to us, and even fewer that we can realistically pursue before game over.

Using our five tactics for expanding opportunity horizons, we will have discovered many of these possible professions. Engineer, detective, photographer, manager. Automator, advisor, installer, influencer. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. Now the time comes to make hard choices. How do we choose the quest that suits us best?

In life, as in games, this will not be a single-factor decision. When choosing quests in open world RPGs, we might consider how fun the mission sounds, the number of experience points it yields, how the quest fits into the overall story, and how long it takes to complete.

Later in this book, we'll look at other kinds of role-playing games—massively multiplayer onlines (MMOs) and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBAs). In these team-based games, players assign themselves characters with different ...