Games are the cheapest training environment for systems thinking the species has ever invented. Every game is a model — simplified, legible, with feedback loops fast enough to learn from. Players who win are the ones who internalize the model.
This is not metaphor. Strategy games, tabletop, even card games are repeatedly the place where engineers report first encountering the habits of mind they later applied to production systems.
Take play seriously. It is rehearsal disguised as leisure.
