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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."
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.
If you ever come into a situation where you have to train 10 or 25 people not to stand in fire, you call me.
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.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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.