The Gaming Question: Or Is World of Warcraft valuable training?

They don’t teach that in B school — at least not yet. In fact, Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more. The game, which many Gen Yers learned as teens, is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. “It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on work projects,” says Carter. “The kids are already doing it.”

- TIME Magazine on The Future of Work (May 2009) Article that the quote is from: When Gen X Runs The Show

In reading through TIME Magazine’s article above, I found this quote on gaming quite interesting. It came up suddenly as generational change in management was discussed. This article argues that in about 10 years, “Generation X” (born mid 1960s to late 1970s) will be in management roles and that they will be do better at, “… collaborative decision-making that might involve team members scattered around the world..” The author of the article then quotes the Chief Information Officer of FedEx as saying that World of Warcraft, with about ten million users around the world, offers good preparation. This is interesting speculation and worthy of more investigation.

Many in the profession have been looking seriously at gaming for several years now. In my own courses and professional association work, I’ve used services such as Second Life and others as well. In some ways, “game” is misleading as a term – something like virtual immersive environment might work better as a broad term. Some readers may not have heard about the video games in library trend, so I would point you to this ALA blog dedicated to the topic, a 2007 blog post at the Association of College and Research Libraries blog, and the Library of Congress started a program in 2007 to preserve video games as an aspect of American culture. There is also the Serious Games Canada project which explores, “.. the use of Computer/Video games for non-entertainment purposes..”Also on the preservation front, there is also the project that Professor Megan Winget is understaking at the University of Texas-Austin iSchool: “{re}Create: Studying the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry.”

There appear to be at least two different trends in the way that information professionals have approached gaming. The older approach is to simply view it as another form of recreation that can be offered to users which is commonly used in public libraries. In addition to that, some libraries are looking into how games (or virtual environments like Second Life) can be used to arrange meetings, create stimulating experiences and so forth. There is quite a lot of debate in the profession about this and it is worthwhile to have that debate.

Here’s what I wonder about though. It is worth experimenting with some of these games to see what they are like and if there is some use for them. The recreation question is a really interesting one to me. Who said that libraries have to focus on specific types of media? If public libraries have feature films on DVD, board games (in some places), then why not video games? It might be decided that it is not a good idea in a given place, but it is worth discussing. The suggestion that games can develop new social skills – such as collaboration – strikes me as speculative right now. That said, I see it as professional duty to stay informed and engaged with how people experience culture, entertainment and information so we need to keep an eye on this.

Related posts:

1. Two Valuable Student Projects
2. An Introduction to A Curious View of the World