I recall back in the early 90s my buddy (who is now an EVP of games dev at blizzard) - was asking me why I didn't like playing masters of Orion- I told him "it's no fun to play a spreadsheet"

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Then I read this interesting article about a guy in SF several years ago and he was the key accountant, strategist for (whatever that massive space battle game is that was hyper popular with the russians) - and he didn't even play the actual game! All he did was manage the massive assets of their guild faction with excel and other tools and they were making hundreds of thousands in real dollars per year and that was his actual IRL full time job.

The one where they had that massive battle and thousand and thousand of real money was lost on the eradication of huge digital fleets...