Work should look like Civilization
Enterprise software has an aesthetic, and the aesthetic is punishment. Rows. Filters. A left nav with nineteen items. A dashboard nobody has opened since the demo. Somewhere along the way we all agreed that managing work should feel like filing taxes. Then the same people who suffer that interface all day go home and spend six happy hours managing lumber.
Strategy games are resource-allocation software
Strip the knights and the wonders off Civilization or Age of Empires and look at what's actually left: a map, a limited pool of workers, a research queue, and a fog of war you push back by deciding where to spend attention. You choose where to scout, what to research, and who does what. That's the whole game.
That's also just work. Territory, prospects, limited hours, research you queue up and wait on. The difference is that the game industry spent thirty years polishing an interface for exactly this problem, while business software spent the same thirty years adding more filters to a table.
And here's the part that makes it more than a gag: everyone already knows how to play. The people who would use a tool like this at work have years of training on this exact interface. They know what a map with markers means. They know what a research queue is. Nobody schedules an onboarding webinar for Age of Empires.
So I'm experimenting: a CRM research and resource-allocation tool that looks — deliberately, unapologetically — like a strategy game. The board is a real state. The fog is real ignorance about real companies. And the workers are AI.
Research is an expedition
Pick a patch of the map, or query it like a database — zip codes, income levels — and aim research at it. Then choose the rounds like you'd queue a tech tree: some Google, an open-web crawl, a few Perplexity passes, some Claude. Launch the expedition over the companies it finds.
In a spreadsheet-shaped tool this would be a modal with twelve checkboxes and a Submit button, and it would feel like paperwork. Framed as an expedition into the fog, it feels like a decision. It's the same action. One of them I actually want to do.
AI villagers
The other half is the workforce. AI research jobs get assigned the way you'd task villagers: this worker takes that area, hones in on an industry, works its plan, reports back. The map fills in where they've been. At a glance — the same glance a strategy game trained into you — you can see where your attention is deployed and where the fog still sits.
That glance is the whole point. Strategy games solved the problem of showing a human the state of many parallel efforts across a territory, twenty-five years ago, so well that people do it recreationally. I'm just refusing to pretend a table does it better.
So is it a game or a job?
It's an experiment, and an early one. But the premise feels sturdier every time I use it: these interfaces were really great at what they did in a game sense, and it turns out they're really good at doing the same thing in real life. The genre was never about castles. It was about deciding where finite effort goes — which is the job description of everyone who's ever opened a CRM.
Might gamifying sales and research make the work more fun? I don't know yet.
At least it's more fun for me.