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World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things?
Gamasutra has a 'Soap Box' editorial up discussing the bad lessons World of Warcraft teaches. From the article: "1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien."
I've worked at a few places where seniority trumped skill. Thankfully, I've also worked at several where it didn't. The sad truth is that the "lesson" that WoW teaches is in fact real in many places.
This guy's the limit!
Since when was the purpose of WoW to teach the fundamentals of life and fairness?
Look, it's a video game. It's not a job interview, a checkout line in a grocery store, a pay-scale within a company. It's a video game. Act accordingly.
And if you still insist on trying to learn lessons from it, at least consider all of the lessons. For example, getting used to and interacting with a variety of classes and races without discriminating based on each characters appearance. And that a womans appearance does effect how you treat her. And that age doesn't matter, maturity of mind does.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
How much time did your star programmer spend learning his skills? I'd assume quite a bit. In WoW you spend massive amounts of time getting gear so you can kill off mobs quickly and effectively. In the real world you spend massive amounts of time learning a skill so you can tackle your job quickly and effectively. In my opinion the OP is looking at it from the wrong way.
That was one of the coolest things of MUDs (for youngster, the text-based MMORPGs of days gone by, though some still exist): in most of them, once you reached a high enough level, you could join the programming team and create your own new areas for the game. I learned more practical coding skills from nights of hacking LPC than from my computer science study.
Designing new areas would be quite the cool endgame for WoW lvl 60s. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that it takes too much skill and training these days to create good enough content for games like that.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Yes, that sort of thing. :-) And we couldn't resist trying to cheat...
We were players, we used to also have an "illegal" wizard character, but it got banned. We knew someone else from our uni had one, and hadn't used it for a year... login as Guest, send one mail saying "Hi, I'm Cobra, I want to code again but forgot my password, could you set it to 'sven'?" was all it took... then we went to a meeting in England, and while we were in a taxi with some admins who had picked us up from the station, they asked something like "Do you know if the Cobra who's logged in recently is the real one? Because we've got someone else claiming that _he_ is Cobra and his wizard was stolen..." Managed to bluff our way out. Years later we gave the account to someone else, who didn't know the history, and it happened some months later that the real Cobra was on the computer next to his when he logged in, and went ballistic... Fun times.
Or make an item that you can move into someone's inventory; it did something like 'add_action("", "funcname", 1)', which meant that each and every command that person did (and wasn't handled by the room object) would be passed through funcname() (executing with his permissions), and if that function returned false, the MUD would look at the next item in the inventory to see if that item perhaps implemented the command, so the person would never notice anything odd. So we'd move an item into an admin's inventory that added a line to the serialized savefile of another admin (changing his password), then destructed itself. We didn't login as the admin (too obvious), but we did have ftp access to absolutely everything... we changed the then Law admin (who annoyed a lot of people) into a lvl 16 playerkiller _player_ (attackable by almost everyone) and removed all traces of what we did. Admin died rather quickly after he logged in, utterly confused.
But it does make the code I write today more secure than most people's :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
You're making your comment in jest, I know. You actually have a good counterpoint to his article: His claim is that the life skills WoW teaches are bunk, and you point out that "making money" is a life skill in the USA.
:)
:)
Why not look at his points one by one? He repeats himself twice, so he really just has 3 objections:
Time > Skill
He's right that a great talent can do as much in less time as a mediocre talent. That's just to get the same quality of work.
My best friend is in a band. He and I both admit that I have more musical talent in my left arm than he has in his whole body. The difference is that I'm a slacker, and he's constantly working at it. The result is that he has more and better CDs than I will ever make. His Ability far exceeds anything I've ever accomplished in any context.
And that's how it goes: Ability is a combination of effort and talent, and the coefficients favor effort: The mediocre talents who put in great effort always get ahead of the great talents who put in a mediocre effort in the real world.
I also feel that this is more fair; God has not seen fit to distribute all talents evenly, so claiming that talent is the most valuable thing (moreso than effort or ability) is tantamount to saying that blond hair and blue eyes are more valuable than black hair and brown eyes.
So here, I have to agree with what WoW teaches.
group > solo
I'm an introvert, just like the author. I am not a hermit. A few years back, I took the Dale Carnegie course -- you know, that Dale Carnegie?
The knowledge I gained changed my life. Learning the skills of how to get along with others didn't mean abandoning the introverted lifestyle. The main thing to realize is that people skills are learned skills, not inherent abilities. Even if you're an introvert, that doesn't mean you want to be a hermit or die alone -- and it also doesn't mean you can't learn how to deal with people effectively.
Your so-called "superior" may be an idiot jerk to you, but he got his position because he isn't a jerk to the right people. And if you look at the superiors who are great managers, they aren't great because they know more about your field than you. They're great because they are easy to get along with and know how to let you do your job well.
Take a look at the great bands that were great together, but when they split apart the solo acts all seemed wanting. Or how your family is not just a number of people, but seems to have a life of its own. Very few people really want to be completely alone, but some of us are just not very good at it; it would be a problem, except that anyone can get better at it. I know that I did -- or at the very least, I recognize my mistakes when I make them now.
So once again I find that WoW is teaching the right things with real life.
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I don't really have an opinion on this, because I am not a subscriber.
Work, in the real world, is more valuable than skill, and it also seems more fair that it should be that way. And well-made groups are more valuable than the sum of their parts -- especially families. In the end, I'd say the top two lessons he says WoW teaches are very important lessons and are the right things to teach.
Funny, I always thought that time *is* what gives you rewards. What percentage of your typical slashdot geeks are paid by the hour?
I think you'll find that "skill at the job" is, ultimately, what determines the size of that pay check. If you're highly skilled you will probably be paid a lot more for your time than someone who is just starting out. The main reason that time is used is that time is a lot easier to measure than skill - unless the job has a lot of very clearly defined tasks and milestones it is far more effort for the payroll staff to try and measure the results of your work and pay you accordingly than it is to set an hourly rate based on a general assessment of your skill and assume that the results of your labours are roughly equal to their initial estimation of the amount of value you can produce in an hour multiplied by the number of hours you worked. It is that estimation of "amount of value you can produce in an hour" that really determines how much you get paid, and that is solely determined on their best estimates of your skill.
Jedidiah.
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