Git can feel like a boss battle: confusing, punishing, and full of mechanics you weren’t properly warned about. But if you've ever played a video game, you already understand more about version control than you think.

In this talk, we’ll reframe Git’s concepts through game design, from commit as your checkpoint save to stash as a quick inventory swap. Then we’ll level up: what does rebase have in common with timeline rewrites? Why is reflog your hidden save system?

Whether you’re early in your Git journey or managing complex workflows across teams, this talk will give you a new, more intuitive mental model for working with Git using the kind of logic games have taught us for years. You’ll leave with deeper insight into history, recovery, collaboration, and confidence, navigating even the trickiest parts of your version control quest.

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Mike Lehan at 16:50 on 24 Oct 2025

Nice idea to use games as an analogy. The audience interaction via the poll platform was good, and the videos of some of the more complex interactions worked well

Cory Stine at 17:34 on 25 Oct 2025

LOVED this talk. Git can be difficult to wrap your head around even when you have experience with it. I'll come back to these game analogies a lot in the future to help parse out these commands in my head.