A study conducted by Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone, and Tony O’Driscoll, published in Harvard Review, explains that they very well might be.
It almost sounds ridiculous. The business forerunners of tomorrow could potentially be hiding within the withdrawn online gaming populace. According to the authors, these Massively Multiplayer Online Games often craft perfect environments for leadership of a team. Players in many of these games must ban together under ‘guildmasters’ to slay dragons, climb mountains, and conquer planets much as business employees pool their skills under managers to overcome challenges and draw in mounds of moolah. The article explains that similarities are surprisingly very common between the office and fantasy-littered environments. To name a few: partakers are rewarded for their overcoming of obstacles and must learn to deal with failure in spades; leaders delegate jobs to others; and the trial of new strategies plays a vital role. All in all, these two very separated worlds do seem to share many likenesses. Looks like using World of Warcraft or any other online game to train managers may not be so farfetched after all.
Of course, differences exist, and the text acknowledges that. For one, the infrastructures of multi-national conglomerates tend to be a smidge more intricate than those of virtual, 40-man raiding groups. Failure and loss also amount to a lot more when dealt in reality. Obviously, no one ever grasped the gravity of losing millions of dollars by dying a few times within the walls of a virtual world. Still, the advantages of having lived in one are almost undeniable.
Though I’ve only read abstracts of the actual study itself I feel like I’ve grasped a sufficient amount of what the authors were looking at and who they sampled to gather their information. And being a former World of Warcraft-er myself, I can at least vouch for most of what the authors found on the virtual end. The similarities are definitely there. In fact, I pondered this very possibility on occassion while playing the game. I was placed in leadership positions once or twice in my hardcore ‘guild’ and found the position as stressful as all get-out. It’s not exactly a fun place to be in and struck me as more of a job than a means for leisure. But if stress levels can indicate the similarities between real and virtual leadership, then I can most definitely attest to this article’s value. Hopefully, I and those who played with me got as much out of the endeavor as this study anticipates.
November 19, 2008 at 11:53 am
Hey mister, I was reading your blog post, and I find your ideas on the future of us MMG nerds to be very positive, and hopefully true. As someone who spends 23 of the 24 hours of the day on World of Warcraft in some capacity (thank you, laptops!), I foam at the mouth at the possibility of one day running a company.
That is until I remembered that running a company could potentially take time away from playing World of Warcraft. Lest you forget, the makers are constantly updating and adding expansions to WoW. There is no reason to believe this will ever end (unless they make a World of Warcraft 2, which I will buy and play to death just as I have played the current edition), and thus, I can very well forsee living the rest of my life on WoW. When, then, would I have the time to run a company?
But I do appreciate the effort at putting us in a positive light. Death to noobs!