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Boss By Day, Gamer By Night
Ant writes "Computerworld queried seven executives at some of today's top tech firms to learn how they started gaming, what they play now, and how their virtual skills translate to the real world of the office. Alan Cohen, vice president of enterprise solutions at Cisco Systems, had this to say: 'Now, increasingly, games are Internet 2.0 encounters. They're all about how well you work together with others any time, any place, with players from around the world. Rock Band 2, World of Warcraft, even Guitar Hero promote the shared experience and are all about how together we can do more, be more, compete better than we can by going it alone. That's right in line with how the corporate environment is evolving: You can play (or work) anytime you want, and you have to compete and collaborate on a global basis in order to succeed.'"
So this brings in that old question of play vs work. Do you keep them separate?
What if your counter strike team smeared the bosses last night?
Well, we don't smoke crack, but I had a beer chugging contest with my boss this past Saturday.
I won. He declared a rematch on New Years Eve.
As a bit of background, I'm a 100% telecommuter from my home on the East coast, with the vast majority of my company based in Silicon Valley. I don't get as much in the way of facetime with the team - in ~6 years working this way, I've met my boss (and the rest of the company) less than 5 times. We're friendly for sure, but the distance does occasionally make for strained work relationships.
A year or so back, during a weekly internal conf call, I heard several of the higher-ups talking about their WoW PvP experiences. I had no idea they were gamers, and they apparently didn't know I was either. I decided to share that, and found they were entirely cool with my gameplay, even enthused. At the time, I was a regular in a casual raiding guild (semi-weekly raids, months behind uberguilds), so I was able to share some tips with the gang about stat builds, leveling strategies etc. I even went so far as to critique the gear of my boss's boss's level 70 pally, giving him tips on what to pick up to prep for tanking for their guild.
Since then, we've all stopped WoW'ing regularly, but the experience and sharing was really worthwhile. It certainly wouldn't be appreciated at every company, but use your judgment, and perhaps discussing, even playing, with your coworkers is worth the risk.
RW
So play co-op campaigns in Left 4 Dead.
He'll appreciate it when you knock that hunter off of him, and you'll keep your damn mouth shut when he fails to do the same.
Just watch the friendly fire.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. I think the flow of skills between gaming and management is a two way thing, although only in fairly specific circumstances.
I don't honestly think that just playing the average platformer, rhythm game, first person shooter or beat-em-up really adds much at all to your work-place skills, beyond a bit of hand-eye co-ordination. Even playing team-based online shooters doesn't necessarily help.
However, once you move beyond simply playing the game and move more into the community side of things, you can start to pick up some seriously useful experience.
When I was looking for "proper" work after finishing up my post-grad (as opposed to the summer jobs I'd had while a student), I ended up passing the initial intellectual aptitude tests and getting through to the assessment centre stage for one of the most competitive graduate recruitment schemes in the UK (over 15,000 applicants for around 400 places, in the year I applied). I was up against people who'd done internships in national newspapers, travelled the world doing interesting things, been president of umpteen student societies and so on. By contast, my own experience was a few summers of boring (but fairly well paid) tech support/web design and administrative work, a bit of political canvassing and way too much time "wasted" on gaming. "Ok", I thought, as I got myself ready, "I'm in trouble now".
So, I cast around for other things I could talk about that I'd done. Pretty much the only really striking thing was that I was the (unpaid) head admin of a fairly large European-based Counter-Strike league. This was basically something I'd moved towards by degrees; from being a player in a team in the league who was perpetually frustrated by its organisational problems, to being a volunteer admin who refereed matches and mediated disputes to being the head admin, who recruited and managed the other admins, negotiated with sponsors for better server hardware and moved the league from a free-to-play to a subscription basis.
So in the absence of other options, I decided to take a huge risk and focus on this experience at interviews, hoping and praying that I would get an interviewer who wouldn't just dismiss it as some computer-game silliness. My heart sank when I found that my interviewer was a 60-ish guy in a suit. However... the interview went stunningly well; he asked me about the differences between managing a paid team and a team of volunteers (particularly in terms of dealing with poor performers), the difficulties in getting "customers" used to having something for free to pay for a product, the challenges in negotiating with financial backers and so on. And I was able to answer all the questions fluently. He didn't have a clue about computer gaming and admitted as much, but the management and business sides of what I'd done were perfectly relevant. I passed the centre and still have the same employer 6 years later (having moved up a few pay bands in the interim).
Of course, head admins of leagues are pretty few and far between and I think the old concept of the "unpaid volunteer head admin" has largely died out as fps gaming becomes more professionalised (a move which was already starting back then and which I've never been comfortable with). However, I think there are other aspects of gaming which can have a positive impact on your business skills - as well as some areas where a management post at work can have a beneficial impact on your gaming.
MMOs almost inevitably present the best examples, particularly if you have a raiding guild (or the non-WoW equivalent). A middling-hardcore raiding guild (which is to say, a guild which takes raiding seriously, but whose members have jobs and some vestiges of social lives) is an organisation held together by varying degrees of cameraderie, traditions and naked self interest. Much like the average work-place, in other words. You have the ambitious newcomers who want to change everything. You have the burned out old-timers who think the guild owes the