Our second company visit was to Wargaming, a video game company that is known for a variety of authentic war-based tank, plane, and ship multiplayer games. Located in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, the Wargaming headquarters staggers over the city and is a beautiful building for the city to look at. When we were first greeted by the staff, we were taken down to their basement where they showed us an extensive series of facilities focused on wellbeing including gyms and saunas. Our guide explained how Wargaming is focused on work-life harmony rather than work-life balance and placed emphasis on the attitude that there is no separation between work and life. Therefore, the purpose of the basement is to provide employees with opportunities to take a break and de-stress. 

I thought it was interesting that Wargaming chose to show us the workout areas and other well-being rooms before they introduced us to the company as a whole. In addition, they took us up to the 13th floor where we enjoyed an extensive view over Nicosia. It seemed as though Wargaming, reflective of Cyprian culture, wanted us to feel comfortable before getting to business. It was clear Wargaming was very proud of their accomplishments for the care of employees’ mental and physical health. A clear staple of their business practices was to make sure we felt looked at as human beings and not as pure investments. While this is somewhat unlike U.S. practices, the work-life harmony our guide referred to was actually created by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, and is a reflection of U.S. practices. Enforcing this idea of making sure employees are happy was the attitude that Wargaming told us they encourage their employees to play games during their shift, to keep them interested and relaxed. The remainder of the visit was a series of presentations along with questions. Wargaming was a pioneer in Free-To-Play games and utilizes a content pipeline, rolling out new features of their games to keep them engaging. Aside from their game development, Wargaming does a lot of community outreach, giving back to historical museums and local citizens. This obligation the company has to the community is very unlike most U.S. gaming companies. 

Later that afternoon, our group traveled back to the University of Nicosia (UNIC) for some group activities with the local students. Our first activity was to calculate the amount of CO2 we produced in traveling from the University of Pittsburgh to UNIC. The final number was shocking, and it was great to have the opportunity to speak with a local student. He moved from Russia and explained some of his experiences. He described that in his first year, he had to travel every day to school from Limassol to Nicosia (a drive that is over an hour), and explained how he woke up every morning at 4:00 to catch the bus and make it to class. It made me realize how many Americans make their lives as convenient as possible. Most of us live on campus and eventually bring our own cars all to make our lives easier. This student lived far away from campus and had to take public transportation to make it to classes.    

Our second activity was more of a business-focused, collaborative exercise to work on teamwork. Unlike the first activity, I was not impressed with the second. We worked on tests that many of us U.S. students took in fourth grade and created stories from a cartoon brainstorming board. In addition, many of the students I interacted with seemed disinterested and even left early from the activities. However, there was still a solid proportion of the students that stayed to the end and were engaged. Many of us had fun over the last exercise which was to make a tower out of uncooked spaghetti and tape. Nonetheless, it was clear the student body at UNIC is extremely diverse with many backgrounds and nationalities along with a span of varying work ethic.