Researcher Claims World of Warcraft Builds Great Employees

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Its true, but only out of coincidence.

The type of person who will follow directions provided without ever questioning them. Plus
The type of person who is pointlessly competitive over trivial unimportant nonsense? Plus
The type of person who can operate a mouse and keyboard? Plus
The type of person who can repeat rote actions tirelessly and accurately to script? Plus

Congratulations... Your many years in playing WOW has qualified you for lifetime employment availability in the always growing telecommunications "Call center" Industry. With only nominal additional instruction, you will be able to build on your already established skill set and translate it into selling land line phone service, Magazine subscriptions, Charitable donations. Or if you are the truly aggressive type, you will find yourself right at home in Debt collections or Skip tracing. Did you customize your GUI? Great, youll also qualify as Technical support representative. Pay your account with a credit card? Congratulations, you can work in accounts receivable. Do you help with directing raid groups? You might have what it takes to enter early management programs. Are you a raid leader who has built a successful raid guild from the ground up? Excellent, you will have the skills needed to be effective in quality assurance.

See World of Warcraft is now the premier gateway to your vocational future. It is like what the US army was two decades ago, but without the nifty veterans benefits and the potential of the whole dying thing.

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In all seriousness, Yeah, its true. WoW can teach you valuable job skills that would be desirable. For some of the most loathsome and undesirable work humanly possible, of which is still sort of moot considering the biggest bulk of the types of jobs it would potentially help with........ have long since been shipped to India, Philippines, Costa Rica or any other country with a work force capable of learning basic English and blurbish that executives think is ok to ship off in order to cut down on "needless" overhead.

We take "pride" in the fact that we are the largest BPO place...thingy...location...whatever. We have a very large workforce of call center agents (vampires/zombies, since most of them are nightshifters because of night differential making their pay higher). Good for us, since it creates jobs. Though even with that, new terms are being used in our country. Terms like "Retrenching" and "Strategic Bankruptcy". So there.

[aside]Personally, I work as a Software Engineer and operate my business on the side. It's not easy, I'll tell you, but then it's the only thing holding on to my goal that I could retire by 30.[/aside]

 

[Remus]

You have earned an Achievement! [Job Training]. I see this every day while I'm working. Everything is a risk/reward scenario. People and organizational skills (player mods) can often translate over to real life application. In my Vanguard days, I even started looking at new tasks in terms of their crafting system - Perform Action / Complication / Fix / Improve Quality / Success! Sometimes as a gamer you can't help but look at life in these terms. It definitely makes the day to day grind more appealing.

 

[Riobux]

And the most important lesson? To mentally cope with incompetence and immaturity and not to resort to bringing an assault rifle into work one day and mowing down everyone that has wronged you.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

This doesn't mean playing WoW will make you better at life, and it doesn't mean a lot of gamers aren't lazy either.

It could work either way I think, having good leadership skills IRL makes you a good GM.

God, people will latch onto anything if it makes them feel better about themselves.

 

[Strazdas]

teamwork, ability to listen and follow orders well while having knowledge of strick and dynamic leadership structure vs theoretical knowledge, of which 80% is never EVER needed in real life and a paper claiming "you are now educated". yead i can see where he is coming from.

It could work either way I think, having good leadership skills IRL makes you a good GM.

God, people will latch onto anything if it makes them feel better about themselves.

yes, havig good leadeship skilsl IRL make you a good GM. but thats the point. if you had good leadership skills in RL but no way to prove them, the guy wont emply you because they dont trust you on your word. by being a sucesfull GM you prove that you have them. its not that wow teaches you, its that wow is providing a proof of sorts.

 

[Charli]

For me personally. World of Warcraft has done exactly what this article says.

But on a case by case basis... egh... bit of a stretch.

But whatever people act dismissive whenever I make the claim, they'll probably dismiss this too.
But raiding really does put structure, pre-planning, organization and teamwork into overdrive if you take it seriously, and will start to reflect in your habits outside of the game.


A player who has raided competitively is a very different beast from someone who has only played the game half hearted-ly and dungeon-ed/lfr'd a bit.

 

[Crazie_Guy]

They may have the right skills, but a WoW player still faces a very difficult obstacle in getting hired: They are a WoW player. As an employer I'd want some darn good evidence that they've been off the MMO and clean for a number of months, and aren't likely to relapse.

 

[daibakuha]

They may have the right skills, but a WoW player still faces a very difficult obstacle in getting hired: They are a WoW player. As an employer I'd want some darn good evidence that they've been off the MMO and clean for a number of months, and aren't likely to relapse.

Only most wow players don't play it obsessively and just play cassually. Besides, if it doesn't effect their work, why go out the way to say they can't.

Most people I've run into on WoW are responsible adults with jobs and families.

 

[WWmelb]

I work in the transport industry managing a LOT of people from a lot of different walks of life much like a raid group. I can honestly say that raid leading high end content in WoW taught me a lot of valuable lessons which i applied to my work life.

Conflict resolution being one of the biggest. Keeping the peace, keeping all participants happy with their role, learning to notice strengths and weakness in people and how to use that knowledge to improve and motivate.

It was a fantastic training tool for me and a lot of fun to boot.

I no longer have time for that kind of thing though, which raiding itself is partly to blame for. The skills i learned while raiding helped me improve my management skills to the point that i received a few promotions, big pay increases and unfortunately though, a lot less spare time lol

But yeah, it was great.

 

[manic_depressive13]

Hurr both R endless grind, bashing MMOs is still c0ol rite guyz?

There, I summed up every comment that's going to be posted on this thread, you can all go home now

Actually I was going to say because they are already accustomed to menial, unrewarding and repetetive tasks.

I don't see why that's something to get upset about. I loved playing WoW before Cata came out but I didn't feel the need to pretend it wasn't a massive grind. It's only "bashing" if you try to argue that grind can't be or shouldn't be something enjoyable.

 

[aattss]

It's a bit more complicated than that. It's probably possible to level up without joining a guild. And then there's the fact that management is only half of being a good businessman. There's also things like focus, being presentable, having good manners, etc. etc. and etc.

 

[Dogstile]

It's a bit more complicated than that. It's probably possible to level up without joining a guild. And then there's the fact that management is only half of being a good businessman. There's also things like focus, being presentable, having good manners, etc. etc. and etc.

Of high end MMO play. High end MMO play is almost always managing people, organising times for raids, sorting out group conflicts, basically everything those shitty team building exercises offices always have people doing. Honestly if they want a team building exercise they should just take the employees to an ice rink and tell them that by the end of the day, they all need to know how to skate to stay employed. Absolutely everyone would need to know, or even the people who know/learned would be fired.

There, instant team building.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Didn't that Norwegian massacre guy say he played WoW every day for a year before he killed all those people? I guess it makes good mass-murderers as well.

Captcha: grain of salt. Yep.