Turns out that all the time I spend in World of Warcraft is honing my management skills. Business Week did an article on how all the skills used in WoW also apply to making the workplace better and more efficient. I think this is probably true, but have admit that my WoW performance, as well as my performance in other video games, reflects the meandering way my career has gone so far.
Serious World of Warcraft players create a character, optimize the heck out of it, and march their way to level 80. They join a guild and do complex 25-person raids on high-end dungeons. Some have more than one level 80, and alt characters who have specific roles, such as farming or banking.
I’ve been playing for a year now. My highest character is level 40, but I have a bunch of them. I have wandered all over the place, and have a host of unrelated achievements. I have yet to find a guild I really like, and don’t really want to be in one where they dictate my schedule or tell me how to “spec” my character.
I have this problem with a lot of games. I like to explore. I’ll spend way too much time on non-essential quests that let me go all over the map. I usually load up on quests, but don’t efficiently drive to the conclusion. Maybe if I focus more when I’m playing World of Warcraft, this will carry over into real life.
Note: I found the article on Business Week while perusing Chainsaw Buddha.
[...] anti-gaming, it’s good to see the Washington Post join the ranks of publications such as Business Week in pointing out that World of Warcraft players really are learning valuable business skills. The [...]
[...] thinking skills are concerned. There is now plenty of evidence (here and here and here and here and here and here, etc.) that the skills learnt by playing games such as WoW are exactly the type of [...]