Revenge of the Gamers!

Reeves, the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and a cofounder of Seriosity Inc., a company that develops enterprise software inspired by online games, told Kathleen Melymuka that smart companies should be playing.

Tell me about the Seriosity study commissioned by IBMIBM. They asked us to study collaboration and leadership in these [game] guilds. Moreover, these games are getting popular enough that, even if we don't want to take lessons from them, the people we're hiring are steeped in them, so we need to at least know what's shaping their lives and contributing to their expectations for software when they get to work. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

What were some of the study's conclusions The most interesting one is that leadership in these games has less to do with the special qualities of the person doing the leading than with the environment itself. Tom Malone and I had looked at the leadership literature, and it's very biased toward leadership as a quality of an individual: Leaders are born, and you have to find them and nurture them.

Gamers were saying in many ways just the opposite: A lot of people can be leaders when there's an environment that's conducive to making it happen. Maybe they're not the most socially extroverted communicators; maybe they just know what's going on. A lot of gamers told us, "I could [lead in a game], and it wouldn't happen at IBM."

What can you do with what you learned A lot of information work is dull and boring, and there are productivity and retention problems that come from that. These games are engaging, compelling and just the opposite. So can we marry the juiciness of these experiences with the productivity needs of business contexts and get people more engaged in their work