A topic I raised during one of the eFest discussion times was around the skill sets developed by users inside gaming environments and how they might be recognised in a formal curriculum. This was related to a job advertisement I had heard of in the USA that had as a criteria being a Guild Leader in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, purely because of the leadership requirements of such a position, and also from findings of Angela A Thomas in her research presentation Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise. In that vein it was interesting to come across this research piece by IBM and Seriosity Inc on Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders.
The results make interesting reading:
Among other things, we learned that the transparent environments created in online games made leadership easier to assume. And that leadership in online games is more temporary and flexible than it is in the business world. And finally, online games give leaders the freedom to fail, and experiment with different approaches and techniques, something that any Fortune 500 company that hopes to innovate needs to understand.
Regards
Aaron/SL: Isa Goodman