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World of Warcraft Can Boost Your Career
Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes reports that although videogames have long been thought of as distractions to work and education rather than aids, there is a growing school of thought that says game-playing in moderation, and in your free time, can make you more successful in your career. 'We're finding that the younger people coming into the teams who have had experience playing online games are the highest-level performers because they are constantly motivated to seek out the next challenge and grab on to performance metrics,' says John Hagel III, co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte. Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, spends six to seven hours a week playing online games and believes World of Warcraft trains him to become a better leader."
It stands to reason that you're learning something when playing a game. It's only a question of how useful that something is in the rest of your life.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, spends six to seven hours a week playing online games and believes World of Warcraft trains him to become a better leader."
Six to seven hours a week? There's a term for someone who plays such an excessive amount of online games. Let me see if I can think what it is... Oh yeah. I remember now.
That term is "NOOB".
makes running a mere business department almost child's play.
politics.
prima donnas.
80% of people are users.
sexual harrassment.
achieving short and long term goals.
managing the sheer logistics of a well balanced guild.
learning to delegate to staff.
etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Running (or trying to run) a significant guild in WoW can teach you more about human group dynamics and people management than you could ever want to know :)
This time I spent playing WoW was *incredibly* valuable to me in this regard, and I don't consider that time wasted at all.
G.
There's definitely some truth in that. One thing that especially strategy games can teach is to deal with resource constraints and to strike a balance between the different objectives that must be pursued, especially a balance between short-term defensive action and the pursuit of mid-term to long-term strategic goals.
I first heard a manager say this in December 1995. He was one of my business contacts and around that time became VP Sales & Marketing of Germany's largest publisher of dictionaries and language-learning materials. I had done some work on the German version of Warcraft II - Tides of Darkness (PR, marketing, sales, and translation; got listed twice in the game's credits) and I gave copies to business partners like the person I just mentioned. He became addicted to it and told me that when his wife criticized him for spending so much time on the thing, he explained to her that this was basically like management training :-)
At the time computer games weren't online, so except for those who went to "LAN parties" with other gamers, gameplay was a solo mission. Now one can actually practice leadership and diplomacy. But even just the virtual resource management challenge of a game like Warcraft II has value in itself.
When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects :-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
Moderation is the key here. Most WoW players that I know do not play in moderation. The time spent playing this game and other Online RPGS is very out of balance with other things that are much more important in life. Such as your marriage, your kids, your job and many other necessary things. If you are single this may not be the case, but you know the point I am trying to make. Please do not get me wrong here, there are those who can play with moderation and more power to you. I myself have done my fair share of online grinding to hit my toons level cap, but I also know that there is a very fine line between healthy online playing and being severely out of balance.
I would absolutely agree.
I tend to be the follower type, happy to do as I am told rather than the leader type coming up with the big plan, so to get some experience in a leadership role, I started a guild in another game (not WoW, but one that tends to attract more players in the 30+ age group) specifically for this purpose. It was an interesting experience, and I was surprised at how willing people are to take direction from a leader and have the burden of decision making taken off their shoulders. I also learnt a lot about resolving group conflicts and expectation management.
Overall the experience greatly increased confidence in my ability to lead a group. Another thing I learnt was that often it doesn't matter what decision you make - right or wrong - as long as you make one and accept the consequences, rather than dithering and doing nothing.
... the only thing WoW teaches anybody is to learn how to waste money on a game that's less of a game then single player RPG's of years past.
I don't think it matters quite what you're doing (WoW or otherwise). As long as it's a people- and team-oriented, competitive experience, you're going to get something valuable from it.
Don't forget that the infamous intarwebs anonymity occasionally has benefits: like allowing people to try out a leadership role (yeah, with other actual human beings following them!) that they might never get in real life.
I'm pretty sure they've all had better careers because of WoW, and of course the majority of the WoW team HAS a career because of it, so its certainly made their careers better.
I would like to point out however, the rest of us have know that 'games boost your career' for years.
Why do you think people play golf? Its not about liking golf, its a awesome way to get someone drunk and talk about business while in a relaxed setting. You get far more accomplished in this setting than you do in a conference room or office. People let their guard down and feel they can trust someone more in that environment, makes deals far more likely to happen.
Real business happens on the golf course. WoW is just another golf course.
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...to run a domain name provider? Let's face it, they're not exactly curing cancer. People who spend half their lives playing WoW are probably well suited to sitting at computers for hour after hour, pushing buttons that are wired to produce reward or punishment at just the right intervals to keep people pushing buttons. Not that different from a lot of dead-end IT jobs, actually. But I wouldn't equate that with WoW being excellent training for anything else.
I've probably spent most of my gaming time playing nethack. I wonder if that counts for anything. I've learned not to steal from shopkeepers, you should always know where the stairs are, and that eating cats is a bad idea. Sadly, writing "Elbereth" on your desk won't keep you from getting fired. It does seem to keep the giant ants away, though.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
It can help your career skills! If anyone actaully finds out that you play, it can seriously harm your career. Regardless of what real-life benefits it might confer, it still comes with a huge stigma. This is the main reason why Blizzard recent efforts with RealID were uniformly rejected by the community. Many gamers, especially MMO-gamers, are still in the "closet" to their friends and co-workers.
Whatever happened to "correlation is not causation"? The article is a little short of scientific evidence to back up its claims except for a few anecdotal stories. Maybe it could be that the types of people who excel at WoW, or are drawn to playing particular games, already have these particular traits. The game may help them realise this, but to say gaming can boost your career is just a silly headline to grab attention. Just because the article is talking about a positive effect of games doesn't mean we shouldn't think about this critically.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I definitely agree. I learned a lot about social dynamics and the power of leadership through the various guilds and whatnot I have been involved with leading.
And World of Warcraft also now promotes working with essentially random groups of people. Recognize the weakest link, and ducking out before you've wasted too much time in a losing proposition.
However, that part about them being heavily concerned about gaming performance gauges concerns me... when people are gaming the measurements, you're not getting a true representation of the criteria that you really care about...
Perhaps though, this also means that people will be better able to recognize when someone is clearly overrated... Sure, your gearscore may be epic, but you're playing like a noob.
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People who play world of warcraft have no lives. This is exactly what certain companies (especially high tech) are looking for. Young employees who will sit down in front of a computer for a million hours without any family or friends to draw them away.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
If you can harness the boundless source of energy that is the Gold Farmer to do mundane corporate tasks, you can rule the world.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But please, do not put this on your resume as one of your skills, or as leadership experience. Some people do this, and it generally just gets them laughed at.
I think you are missing the whole "Interacting with humans" dynamic.
You can have a brilliantly scripted game, but it will always be just that, a scripted game.
Humans add an element of unpredictability that will keep you on your toes.
After you master the "game", you start to learn what really makes the game tick, the variability of human interaction.
I think that human interaction is what the original article is referring to, and what elevates an MMORPG above a standard RPG.
This is obviously debatable, but I assure you that leadership of a robot (NPC) squad bears very little resemblance leading 4 or 5 humans into the fray.
You can't take the sky from me
Having played something like 5 different MMORPGs over the years, with the exception of the teenagers I have yet to come across any unemployed team member in any of the guilds I've been with. For those that have pictures, none is fat. (I myself make about 5x the average income in where I live and am not fat)
I can only think of a couple explanations for the disconnect between what you are saying and what I see:
- You are lying, probably for shock reasons - i.e. you're trolling.
- I'm in the EU zone and you are in another area and the demographics of players is different.
- You yourself are unemployed and usually play at core work hours when anybody with a job will not be online, so everybody you cross paths with is either unemployed or an below work age.
- Personal self-selection: maybe the type of person you get well enough and for long enough with to be told what they do is the kind of people that tend to be fat and unemployed.
I currently live in the UK and I'm sure that if I frequented the local pubs during work days at the core working hours, I pretty much would only come across (fat) unemployed people.
Management skills and combat skills have both the same difficulty, hard to train without doing it for real and the risk are often just to big for it to be done for real.
How do you gain leadership experience when no business in their right mind is going to give a kid a chance? Oh we got this project that the future of the company depends on, lets give it to the new guy. See if he got what it takes.
That is why things like taking part in school activities, running the school newspaper COUNT during a job interview. Shows you did more then just sit on your arse, that you can do something. Lead, take charge.
MMO raid leaders and guild leaders are just the new coach of the highschool soccer team.
If you never played these games, or suck at it, it might not be clear, so allow me to illustrate with Lord of the Rings Online, my own waste of time.
Situation: Minstrels are the primary healing class and you can't find any. What do you do?
Answer 1: I sit there for hour after hour spamming the chat channels asking, demanding no screaming for a minstrel.
Answer 2: I look at the classes I have got and adjust the strategy to handle the situation, for instance by relying on captains for healing and asking the DPS classes to trade some DPS for survivability.
Who would you hire? NO, the point is NOT that knowing that captains can very effective healers or that good champions (dps class that dies a lot) can adjust their style to be less squishy makes you a good manager. The trick is that the second answer showed you can be flexible. Work around a problem rather then beat yourself to death against it.
Situation: Level 65, the discussion on whether the game should be more solo friendly.
Person A: Yes, I am a champ and never can find anyone for the very hard stuff I can't just DPS my way through and I am not a member of a kin because they all suck and expect constant hand holding.
Person B: No, I am a captain and finding a fellowship is easy enough, I start by asking in chat channel if someone else needs it, and if I need to I ask for help from my kin and friend list, since I am a captain, I can always summon someone to my side, a really useful skill. And a captain is always welcome since we give nice boosts to everyone else.
Who do you hire for your team? The DPS who can only DPS because everyone is working their ass of the keep him alive? The prima dona? Or the team player, the guy who knows he is best when he works with others to offset his own shortcoming and augment other peoples strong points?
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Being a successful raid leader means you can make over a dozen people work together who all have their own agenda and who can't be fired. Compared to that, running a multi-national is a piece of cake. Not because leading a raid is the same as leading a business team but because the essential skills have a lot in common. It is what the obstacle course is to real combat. Not the same at all, but the best you can get without actually going to war to train your soldiers. How else is a 16 year old going to get leadership experience? I am perfectly willing to raid with a young kid in charge even if they never done it before. That is how you learn, but have the same kid lead a project at work? No thanks.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Presumably that says more about your social circle than WoW players in general.
I can verify this. I've seen people put MMO/Guild Master on their resume. We laugh at them. And as a guild member and a leader in the corporate world I can tell you that while there may be parallels, the one in no way prepares you for the other. Don't put it on your resume. Don't talk about gaming in interviews. Even as a gamer I wouldn't hire you. Why? I know from personal experience 99.999% of WoW players are morons and whiners who stand in fire and cry about gearscore and dps charts, so statistically you would probably be a terrible employee.
The "weakest link" in a group is actually often going to be the person who looks at the group and quickly comes to the judgment that it will fail and then leaves based on metrics like Gear Score or "LOL Pally only has 25khp!" Or quitting because not everyone has the achievement for whatever it is that's about to be done.
That person is basically saying that they are incapable of running a dungeon without everyone being INSANELY overgeared for it and they are not willing to take any risks in an environment where the absolute worst thing you're risking is about 10-15 minutes of your time. Further, they're also poor judges of risk/reward: if you drop out of a random group before a certain amount of time is up, you can't join another random group for a bit, so they traded being in a group that might or might not be good (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time) for DEFINITELY not being in a group (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time).
Finally, though this is not always the case it seems to often be the case, these people are the ones who, when they are on a team they will behave like prima donnas. If it's a tank, anyone who doesn't behave exactly as the tank wants will be votekicked or the tank will just drop group because they can get an instant queue (once their timeout is over). If it's a healer, they'll bitch and moan and possibly drop group, but in any case it's not so great for team cohesion. If it's a DPS role, well, they'll just call people scrubs, and behave like they're incredibly important despite the fact that they can be instantly replaced.
So, if you want a bunch of people who will quit at the first sign of adversity, are lousy at assessing risk vs. reward, are unwilling to take on new challenges or risks, are deadly to team morale and cohesion, and who generally rely on expending VASTLY more resources on a project than the goals of the project merit in order for it to have any "success" then yes, by all means, pick people who's judgment has been "honed" by the random group tool in WoW.
Mind you, I personally like the tool because I'm 99.9% of the time playing a tank, so I have instant queues. I also know how to play tanks well, and can adapt my tanking style to handle teammates who are poorly geared or overgeared (which has its own problems) and of whatever skill level. The only time it gets dicey is if I have a bad (read: does not know how or is unwilling to manage their heals effectively so minimize the windows where a string of unlucky numbers can cause a wipe) healer, but even then I'll take a minute to ask them if they want advice to make things go more smoothly.
I will say that in general, guilds in WoW are not really my favorite thing, BUT I have learned some valuable lessons from being guilded and having to manage that:
- Don't have preconceived ideas of how people might behave or how mature they might be based on demographics. I've had remarkably mature teenagers in guilds where the 45 year olds behaved like colicky infants most of the time.
- Many people say things quickly that *can* be taken in a bad way and lead to an argument. Instead, take a moment before getting angered and ask them what they REALLY meant, because most people aren't actually hostile dickbags - they're just poor communicators.
- Any reward allocation system, regardless of how fair it seems on paper, regardless of people agreeing to bide by its rules, will be complained about the first time those rules work against one person's favor and towards another.
- In a performance based environment, it helps to have concrete displays of performance metrics and to provide small incentives to encourage competition between people who are in the same role. Do not make the incentives TOO big because then you will have people screwing others to get their win.
- People who are inflexible are almost always going to drag your team down. The inability to adapt to new situations or take failure as a learning experience is a HORRIBLE trait, and unless there is some kind of massive and nearly impossible to replace positive that kind of person brings to your team, dump them if they can't change their ways after getting feedback.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
However, that part about them being heavily concerned about gaming performance gauges concerns me... when people are gaming the measurements, you're not getting a true representation of the criteria that you really care about...
In many companies that IS important. I've worked a few places where it was far more important to appear successful than it is to actually be successful.
The most relevant example I can think of is way back in my phone support days. We had a ton of metrics - Average calls/day, Average calls/hr, first call resolution rate, % time spent on hold between calls, etc. That last one almost got me fired. I averaged about 70 calls/day with a 5-6 minute average call length and something like 70% first call resolution (this was before every call center had remote control capabilities, so it was support based purely on what the user was describing, and that was really high).
The call center average was something like 45 calls/day and a 10-12 minute per call average. While I was spending the same amount of time per call on hold in between calls finishing up filling out the tickets, the same amount of time per call multiplied by more calls = higher percentage of time on hold.
Some people in management didn't quite get the math and overall picture and wanted me fired. I wasn't meeting all of the metrics that were set and that's what mattered. Fortunately others managers did get it and fought to keep me employed while warning of me the numbers game and working with me to present the numbers that people wanted to see.
know from personal experience 99.999% of WoW players are morons and whiners who stand in fire and cry about gearscore and dps charts, so statistically you would probably be a terrible employee.
Congratulations. You are statistically a terrible employee.
I know from personal experience 99.999% of WoW players are morons and whiners who stand in fire and cry about gearscore and dps charts, so statistically you would probably be a terrible employee.
You're contradicting yourself to the point of making your estimates accurate. You've combined the noobs (stand in fire) with the leets (gearscore/recount). With the oblivious and the uppity all together in one group, I'm less than surprised that there's no one left.
I'm also underwhelmed to find that you can point to a group as large and diverse as 'WoW players' and find extreme examples of bad behavior.
What does mildly surprise me is that you're both oblivious to the fact that this applies to any large group AND you're allowed to hire people. That contradiction is a bit hard to swallow, but I guess that's probably not too strange in the corporate world, is it?
I've never related tanks directing every aspect of a fight to micromanaging before, but your post really brought out that sort of idea to me.
I've really only played DPS through the random queue, and as such, I knew that I was instantly replaceable. But then I practiced on Anarchy Online, that provided actual loss for a death, (originally especially.) Wipes seriously sucked, you lost experience, and your stats were diminished by some 75% for ten minutes. You learned your role, and you did it well, and if your team started to fail, you made sure that you protected yourself. And heaven help you, if you let your healer die, they likely were going to bail on the team (not like he could heal for ten minutes after the death anyway).
My reference and experience in the random group feature of WoW is mostly from my friend, who has an 80 of every single healing class in the game. She is a healer, and she knows healing. She knows that after a two or three wipes, that her team is not going to do well, and she needs to leave.
This isn't about being a prima dona, although when she gets a tank who starts trying to "micromanaging" her, she starts to expect things are going to suck. Just as you noted.
And I think I was trying to point out the "razor edge" in the random group feature... in some ways, it teaches you to succeed with diverse input. Namely, not only when everyone is super overpowered for the task, but when people are simply sufficient to the task.
But as you pointed out, people who demand overgeared to make everything easy become apparent, and we can I think all agree that these people have learned bad habits.
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