The Video Game Revue

WoW as a Management Training Tool

Check out this article from Wired about a guy who's skill at running a guild in World of WarCraft helped to land him a management job at Yahoo:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html

Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about.

...

...accidental learning transcends intentional training. When role-playing gamers team up to undertake a quest, they often need to attempt particularly difficult challenges repeatedly until they find a blend of skills, talents, and actions that allows them to succeed. This process brings about a profound shift in how they perceive and react to the world around them. [...] The fact that they don't think of gameplay as training is crucial. Once the experience is explicitly educational, it becomes about developing compartmentalized skills and loses its power to permeate the player's behavior patterns and worldview.

In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. [...]

I hope that somewhere out there, right now, some teenage kid is showing this to his parents. :)

posted by Parappa @ 2:02 PM