How learning like a gamer helped this high-school dropout succeed

There are so many ways to die. You could fall off a cliff. A monk could light you on fire. A bat the size of a yacht could kick your head in. You’ve only just begun the game, and yet here you are, stranded on some strange mountaintop, surrounded by ruins. If you’re a newcomer, you’ll be dead within moments. If you’re a hardcore gamer, you’ll probably be dead a few moments later.

But death isn’t the end. Death is the beginning. You’ll respawn in a graveyard, and that graveyard will lead you to a vast chasm—a pitchblack pit of certain doom. Taking the plunge down into that pit will surely lead you to more death. If the fall doesn’t kill you, it’s reasonable to assume that the monsters lurking down there will.

You can bypass this chasm if you want to—the game will let you keep exploring and playing for hours and hours and hours. In fact, as far as the game’s concerned, you need never take the plunge at all. And if you were a reasonable human being, you wouldn’t.

But you aren’t a reasonable human being. You’re a gamer. You choose the plunge.

You jump down into the crevasse, and it’s a good thing you do. Because in Elden Ring, the only way to access the built-in tutorial is by taking that leap. It’s there, in that graveyard, down that pitch-black pit of certain doom, that your learning begins.

The drop-out

Stacey Haffner dropped out in her senior year of high school. She had enough credits to graduate, but “life just kind of pulled me away,” she says. In years to come, she would return to schooling three more times, and each time, life would pull her away before she finished. She did eventually get a high school diploma, but that was it.

She never got a two-year degree. She never got a four-year degree. And she certainly never got a graduate degree.

Where did this dropout life lead her?

To Microsoft, where she worked on a Windows product serving hundreds of millions of users. To Xbox, where she launched the Xbox Live Creators program, democratizing console game development. And then to Unity, where she became the director of product working on DevOps and eventually transitioning to AI and machine learning. Her role focused on guiding large, multidisciplinary teams with the goal of launching new products within the company. “Basically, I ran a mini startup within the company,” she explains. “My collaborator and I built the whole strategy and vision, from org[anization] culture to final product.”

Stacey didn’t get where she is today by studying like an A-plus student. She got there by studying like an A-plus gamer, leveling up the way every gamer levels up: you see something scary, you take the plunge.

That’s how she learns new software (“I kind of just jump into it.”). It’s how she learned to overcome her fear of public speaking (“I just started putting myself on stage.”). And it’s how she navigated every step of her career—just following the next challenge wherever it led.

After dropping out of high school, she says, “I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I really had no clue. So I just tried things that sounded interesting.” With each job, she got inquisitive about what she loved and what she hated, and then she used those insights to guide her next cycle around the loop.

Eventually that process would lead her into game development, where she’d go toe-to-toe with the NBA in a virtual duel to the death. But not until she’d tried a string of dead-end jobs.

The career game loop

First she answered phones at a staffing agency. She found that work unbearably mundane, but loved learning new skills every time she got to fill in for recruiters who played hooky. So she switched to human resources (HR) and recruiting.

Working in HR and recruiting, Stacey realized that her role was pretty adversarial. She was tasked with protecting her company rather than its people. And its people feared her. That wasn’t going to fly for Stacey, but she did love playing analyst every now and then—crunching the data on employee performance, turnover rates, recruitment metrics, and so on. So she became an analyst next.

It turned out that analyst work was only fun in short bursts, not as a full-time job. When Stacey told her staffing agency that she wanted something new, they offered her a project management role at Microsoft. And it turned out that project management was the perfect fit.

About a decade later, she manages the managers.

Stacey’s cycled the Core Career Game Loop many, many times, and each time, she’s had to level up. She’s used all kinds of strategies along the way, always evaluating what skill she needs to learn, what learning opportunities are available to her, and which methods will support her best.

She’s used booths at conferences, classes at a local college, company-provided training, coaching from bosses and peers, and the most reliable tactic of all: taking the plunge and figuring things out on the fly.

“I’ll watch tutorials, or read a book, or do whatever,” she says. “And then at some point, I’ll get bored of the tutorial, and I’ll just go try, and play around, and do a thing.”

That’s how she’s learned everything she’s learned. It’s how she’s achieved everything that she’s achieved. And it’s how she eventually beat the NBA at its own game.

Nothin’ but net

When Stacey isn’t handling AI for Unity, she creates games for her studio, What Up Games. She’s the CEO, and her husband, Ben, is the CTO.

About 10 years ago, she went to a conference where she tried virtual reality (VR) for the first time. For Stacey, it was love at first sight, and she raced home to tell Ben about it.

Ben hadn’t experienced VR yet, but what he had experienced was sticker shock: the developer equipment was outlandishly expensive.

Stacey insisted he give it a try anyway, and Ben was willing. So they got some goggles and, as Stacey puts it, “Two hours later, Ben finally took off the headset, and he was like ‘Let’s go make a game.’”

Before doing anything else, Ben wanted to get his head around the virtual physics of VR experiences. So the two of them got to work on a basketball simulation.

Basketball seemed like a fun way to figure out the mechanics of VR gravity, but the duo didn’t actually know anything about sports. They didn’t care much either. And, again, they were entirely new to VR technology.

I’m reiterating this because I really want to emphasize: these two could not possibly have been worse prepared to go up against a multibillion-dollar pro-ball brand. But did that stop them? Of course not. We already covered this. Gamers are not reasonable human beings.

Once they’d nailed the basic physics, Stacey and Ben figured they might as well introduce some competition. So they built their first game mode: a VR version of H.O.R.S.E—the schoolyard basketball game where players compete to out-aim each other. Then came multiplayer mode, and before they knew it, What Up Games had a fully operational basketball experience on its hands. They called it Nothin’ But Net.

The next time a major games conference hit their calendars, Stacey and Ben brought the game with them. And it absolutely killed. The pair had to lay down duct tape to accommodate the unexpected queue of enthusiastic players, which grew and grew as the day went on.

Then came the official release date. And then came the weeping. “We were devastated,” Stacey says. “I cried so hard!”

Completely unbeknownst to Stacey and Ben, a major studio with official NBA licensing had also been developing their own VR basketball game all this time. By some cruel twist of fate, that blockbuster game dropped on precisely the same day as Nothin’ But Net.

In an instant, years of development were made completely moot. Everything Stacey and Ben had worked for. Every innovation they’d pursued. “When we saw that game release, we thought that no one would even look at ours,” Stacey says. They were about to be blown out of the water by a gaming goliath.

Except, when Stacey stopped crying and checked the industry news a few days later, it turned out that this goliath couldn’t reach the net. The official NBA game had tanked. “Hard pass. Avoid it,” read one review.

Excerpted from The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy by Jessica Lindl. Read more at www.careergameloop.com. Published by Wiley, 2025.

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