MMORPG Skills May Get You Hired …
If only there’d been a story like this back in the early 80s, during the Great Arcade Gold Rush, I would’ve had a much better storyline to use to defend myself to my skeptical parents, questioning why I kept wasting all my spare quarters at the Slots O’ Fun videogame arcade at the London Square Mall.
Apparently, the new online games are figuring into hiring decisions at hi-tech companies like Yahoo – that is, players who prove themselves on the fantasy electronic battlegrounds are being given shots at proving themselves in the “real” world … feel free to contribute overworked overblown overwrought similes comparing the chainmail armor +3 with the business armor of an Armani suit and Hermes tie, or debating the merits of the Valextra Diplomatico briefcase of endless holding +4 (special attacks: drains your wallet of 7000 euros)…
Anyway, in a Marshall McLuhan-meets-Wargames way, it turns out that as much as we were playing the games, the games were also playing us:
Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile
corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize
its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired
through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes
place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental
learning. It’s learning to be – a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture – as opposed to learning about.
Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully
graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual
environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of
failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are
immediate.
One of the things that I found somewhat disturbing was this assertion from The New Marketing blog:
When you’re playing WoW with kids, they suddenly understand why it’s
important to follow instructions. You can’t kill the dragon unless you
follow orders…and when you do, you get a reward.
Sing along now: “We don’t need no education/We don’t need no thought control…” If what you’re doing is trying to socialize kids into being mindless cannon-fodder, that kind of mindset is useful. Befehl ist befehl, as the used to say in the SS … but I would think that parents and game designers (not necessarily the corporations that employ them, but that’s another subject) would not be so interested in plopping junior down in front of the PS3 for a long afternoon of learning how best to be a Good German.
Luckily, what I see most RPGs teaching people is the value of thinking laterally, of researching the challenge set you, assessing your resources, capabilities and the strengths of your team, and then using initiative and inventiveness to make up for any weaknesses. This is great training for being a team leader or member in the increasingly diffuse web-based economy we’re finding ourselves in.
However, the whole acquisitiveness ethos of the D&D/WoW/RPG pantheon is one that I do have an issue with. The idea that you go through trials and tribulations, plan and adjust and sacrifice so that you can emerge with a *thing* – a magic sword or ring or whathaveyou … that you go out questing and after you slaughter some monsters, you get gold and jewels, etc. – well, it’s a natural reinforcer for a consumerist culture.
I wonder if any elves/orcs/paladins of the online world ever go around grumbling the famous Gore Vidal quote “You work at a job you hate to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like,” as they trudge through yet another dungeon, on the trail of a swarm of deadly waspdragons, all so they can get 22-inch spinning rims on their chariot…
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