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« Improving Applicant Reactions by Altering Test Administration | Main | Using Lake Wobegon to set cut scores »
Playing World of Warcraft could get you a sweet job
On March 31, 2006 by Jamie Madigan
(Selectionmatters.com is going to be going on a 30-day or so haitus in a couple of weeks while I manage some big life changes, so I'm going to make some extra posts outside of the Tuesday/Thursday schedule to offset things. If you want, just save these extra posts up and read them during the impending dry spell.)
A while back I made a post about HR systems in the online video game World of Warcraft. The basic gist was that the people running the guilds of players in these games develop systems and skills for dealing with people issues. And these approaches look a lot like typical HR systems covering recruitment, selection, training, performance management, and "employee" relations.
Selectionmatters.com reader Bryan pointed me to an article on Wired.com that talks about the same kind of issues in the context of what they call "unintentional learning" from video games in general and World of Warcraft in specific.
In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.
It's an interesting little read and I'm glad I'm not the only one having these strange thoughts.
There is, by the way, also an excellent article by legendary game designer Will Wright where he says some things that mirror what I talked about in my post on Everything Bad is Good for You about how video games stretch cognitive skills in ways that people don't typically notice.
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