I Play, Therefore I Get a Raise

IBM, MIT, Stanford, and software startup Seriosity just released results from a study which suggest that online gaming improves "skills related to collaboration, self-organization, risk taking, openness, influence, and communications." Warcraft, Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online -- the more you play, the sharper you get (at certain business-y tasks), ergo the better you're likely to get paid. The logic seems intuitive enough: online gaming certainly requires honing a medley of relevant job-like skills, ranging from proactive social bargaining, networking, organization, and economic manipulation, to reactive strategic and tactical planning.

It's possible vindication for pop-culture theorist Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You), who likes to talk about a "sleeper curve" defying conventional wisdom about pop media. To illustrate what that is, scan the following excerpt from an April 24, 2005 New York Times piece by Johnson entitled "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." (My emphasis in bold.)

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

Consider popular MMOs like World of Warcraft and Everquest, which implement more sophisticated reward/punishment metrics than simplistic action/arcade games like Doom or Half Life 2. The basic act of "ganking" (attacking another player while he or she is occupied fighting monsters) alone requires thoughtful strategic and tactical planning. Am I powerful enough to take this person on? Are there bonuses/penalties? Will it affect my global or guild standings? Do I have the appropriate macros enabled? What's my DPS? (Damage per second.) How much experience and/or loot is victory likely to bring? Forget running up and ramming a sword through someone's gullet for an insta-kill, in other words. Never mind hand-eye coordination, we're talking discrete informational juggling, i.e. everything from on-the-spot mathematical calculating to situational analytics.

Can you bullet point your "300 hours" with Lord of the Rings or Eve Online on a resume yet? Maybe not, but with MIT and Stanford weighing in, chances are that some online games may be steering toward the same sort of respectability in the business community as "serious" simulations enjoy between NASA and all four branches of the military. Also, expect to see more hybrid business/gaming solutions specially tailored to mitigate the "gamey" elements of genre-specific MMOs and perhaps ease the recognition of online "role-playing" as an acceptable job agreement perk. Just look at what companies like ExperiencePoint are up to already.

A few excerpts from the press release:

According to two new studies by IBM, online games like World of Warcraft and Everquest can help the next generation of workers become better corporate leaders...

That?s because massively multiplayer online games enable thousands of players to interact, compete and collaborate with one another in real time. Players must make rapid-fire decisions based on multiple and constantly shifting inputs. Invariably, certain individuals emerge to set direction and shape the success of others. These capabilities are increasingly being sought by businesses as they compete in the global economy ? and they aren?t taught in any MBA program or corporate training program...

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