Since the mainstream media is often 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 Post takes the position that, if it didn’t alarm people so much, you could totally list some of your gaming accomplishments on your resume. Raids, PvP successes, getting into a guild, and just leveling all require management of resources, tracking of tasks, coordination with others, and in some cases, selling yourself.

On the other hand, this guy has decided that World of Warcraft is a religion. I’m going to say that I think his definition is a little too loose. Any avid grouping might fall under it.

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.

My favorite virtual world, right now, is the World of Warcraft.  Because it’s so popular, naturally some people will hate it.  I don’t mind that, I sometimes hate people, movies, television shows, whatever, mostly because they seem way more popular than they deserve.  I understand.  But the reasons people give for hating are sometimes instructive.

One of the silliest World of Warcraft haters has to be the Timothy Plan family of funds.  Ostensibly an investment fund for people who want to invest only in “moral” companies, the plan caters to the over-protective yet inattentive parent who can’t read the description on a video-game but gets all their information from the ever-inaccurate Fox News.  The Timothy Plan released a document that supposedly rates “offensive video games”.  The document doesn’t seem very useful as investment guidance, but seems intended more as a warning to parents.  However, since most of the games are already rated “M”, you might wonder why an additional warning is required.

Then there’s the research.  If you’re investing in and kind of “family of funds,” you probably want solid research.  In fact, the descriptions they give of games seem to be frequently inaccurate.  They have identified WoW as a game where “many attacks cause enemies to bleed.”  Believe me, there are no gaping, bleeding wounds in WoW.  Characters don’t particularly change when you’re beating on them until they make some sighing noise and die.

Then, they claimed there was a lot of sexuality.  Maybe a little, but not as much as in, say, a soft drink commercial.  But this is a claim a number of reporters seem to be making lately.  That there are places in WoW where you can find naked characters having sex.  Which would be awesome.

One of the podcasts I listen to took up the challenge.  None of the podcasters had seen it, but they thought, maybe if they went to a certain Roleplaying server, it would be there.  They proposed that listeners go to a particular town, on a particular server, at a particular time.  Naked.

Naturally, I not only rolled up a character and went along, a let a friend of mine in on the deal.  She not only showed up, she made the biggest splash.  You can read her take on it here.  My take was that 25 people showed up, had a lot of fun, and basically streaked through two capital cities.  A lot of the server residents thought it looked fun and joined in.