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General: MMOs Develop Leadership Skills
Szark
News ManagerMember Posts: 4,420
Seriosity has prepared a report for IBM examining how MMOs develop skills essential to future business and the parallels between corporate leadership and leadership in MMO games.
Complex multiplayer online games foreshadow new possibilities for effective leadership and the future of work. An increasingly large portion of game play is collaborative and strategic, and it requires sustained interactions with several players. The engagement of games and the lessons they foster may influence a new gamer generation to expect real work that better resembles the structure of complex play.
This project observed leadership in complex online games to allow a comparison between current leadership models and leadership in the games. We began with a contemporary model of leadership, The Sloan Leadership Model, which defines leadership in four dimensions - Sensemaking, Inventing, Relating and Visioning. The project goal was to see if the Sloan model, and by extension, other traditional models of leadership, need to be changed to account for game play.
Observations included 50+ hours of game play, compiled into 11 movies illustrating different leadership issues. We also included first-hand reports from 6 expert players, 10 interviews with recognized guild leaders, and 171 respondents to an online open-ended survey about leadership in games.
Read the full report here.
Comments
Ender's Game, anyone?
Shava
Hmm, I like how IBM has discovered that sometimes the highest ranking leader is not always the best to take command in a given situation, and that perhaps junior level managers should be given more control and decision making power in certain situations.
Obviously, if you've played an MMOG there will be times that the guild leader who's an expert at PVE raiding steps aside and the guild's top Arena champion takes the lead in a PVP situation. In GW I have led groups into some of the tougher elite instances like The Deep, Underworld, and Domains of Anguish. But in guild versus guild matches, I'm back to following the leader's commands and targeting calls. This is the fluid sort of leadership IBM is hoping to emulate, where you need to constantly prove your ability to lead and also allow your subordinates to take over in areas where they have more expertise.
If corporate America could indeed learn to give people more power in their areas of expertise, and do a better job of giving talented workers a shot at leading, then I think leadership in gaming might actually help improve leadership in real life. Somehow though I doubt this will happen as the current corporate atmosphere in many companies is winner takes all; the CEO walks away with $100 million for wrecking the company and 9/10 workers get pink slips; and the few workers who remain are so worried about their careers that they won't share knowledge or power with anyone.
After all, nobody loses their home to foreclosure because they got kicked out of a guild for a bad pull.
PS - I love how the report is based on " monitoring 50 hours of play!" That may sound like a lot to a non-gamer, but do the IBM execs who funded this study realize that to really learn the nuances of MMOG playing requires hundreds of hours?
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What they fail to point out, is that playing MMO's too much actually reduces your communication skills, as your verbal ,physical and emotional contact with those around you is sacrificed for a 3D chat room with no consequences. This tends to have an averse effect on your overall leadership effectiveness.
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actually I tend to agree with Godpuppet. The kids I know who interact primarily with friends in chat (MMO, AIM, whatever) have a lack of understanding of body language and subtle language cues that I use daily in business to create relationships, negotiate, deal with office internal and with external politics, and do sales and consultative sales. They are worse at team situations that involve non-gamers because they are blunt, interrupt, and don't seem like they are listening (even though I, as a gamer, understand that they are listening *while* they are talking over someone else).
There was a similar cultural issue with "hacker culture" in the early 80's, where there were a lot of computer nerds who couldn't really socialize their way out of a paper bag coming into traditional business. Now, these kids are actually better socialized, but they might as well be from Mars for all that many of my age peers (I'm pushing 50) can relate.
And unlike us whiz kids in the early 80's, these kids are coming into a horrifically tough job market for the entry level. Socialization and "plays well with others" -- in the more traditional sense -- will be a strong differentiator of who gets hired.
It's not like you have to give up being l337 -- you just have to learn to stealth it effectively...:)
Shava
Hahah, I agree, and I AM one of those "kids".
Usually I talk with my buddies about multiple topics at once over TS or Chat, so basically the conversations we have seem like combinations of totally unrelated Sentences.
Yesterday I was in a Disco with some younger People I barely know, no gamers whatsoever... and what can I say, after an hour or two they looked at me with a facial expression saying something like: "wtf is up with him?", because I...well...I was too quick, my mind jumps were too big for them to follow, while I was horribly bored just talking about one topic at once, while my brain constantly pumped out new ideas which I wanted to throw into the conversation ^_^
So yes, the I-Net changes people, but I don't think it makes them worse leaders...they just need as efficient People beneath them
Yup. I was one of those kids too, in 1982, twenty five years ago (hotshot 23 year old Chief Software Engineer on early multimedia projects at DEC, the machine that brought you Star Wars CGI -- yes, I am older than Goddess). And what I learned was the value of learning the different styles of interaction so I could pwn the world. As a result, I have applied my high charisma to the task of increasing my Persuade and Diplomacy skills over time, to the point where I was solicited to head up the Internet team for one of the Democratic presidential campaigns this year (and took the luxury of turning the gig down -- I value my sanity).
IRL I am executive director of the http://tor.eff.org, and get to play with fun international press and human rights, legal and archgeek hacker toyz.
Every geek organization needs a Speaker to Animals to be the liaison between them and the rest of the world, and they need to treat that person like GOLD. Because if you can't find someone like me who speaks geek and management -- you have to trust some dilbert-universe dude to get you your capital, talk to the press, do your sales, negotiate contracts, and deal with all the traditional business "soft skills."
What am I doing now besides Tor? I'm working on a business to bring real businesses into Second Life for 5-6 figures per contract (dollars, not lindens). Because I can speak conventional business and MMO, this works. (See my blog http://slbizreview.com or the academic blog http://terranova.blogs.com or http://secondlife.reuters.com for more on this concept).
Even if you want to go into game design, you need to adopt a communications interface that treats people as vastly different communities...
Good luck tho!
Shava
Read the full report here.
Interesting study, however I don't see it affecting a whole lot of people, seeing as the general MMO player is little more then a sheep.
I can see it having a bit of relevance towards people whom have a history of raid/guild leading at a competitive level, and assorted other micromanagement positions within similar gaming aspects. Though the realist in me doubts that even the majority of those would shine through in a real world administrative position.
What it ultimately boils down too is a different state of mentality, that isn't easy to define.
Read the full report here.
Interesting study, however I don't see it affecting a whole lot of people, seeing as the general MMO player is little more then a sheep.
I can see it having a bit of relevance towards people whom have a history of raid/guild leading at a competitive level, and assorted other micromanagement positions within similar gaming aspects. Though the realist in me doubts that even the majority of those would shine through in a real world administrative position.
What it ultimately boils down too is a different state of mentality, that isn't easy to define.
a razor sharp observation and there for all the funnier for being stated!None the less I enjoyed reading this dissertation by the students involved. There is some merit in their prognosis and I would consider that mmorpg generally can be more of a benefit, than a hindrance, to the "sheep" and the "wolves".