Revenge of the Gamers!

And there are other differences. One is the whole notion of transparency. In games, there's a lot more transparency in the culture as well as the rules.

You know a lot in the games. You see what gear people have, what level they've achieved, and you know a lot about their status. You're a priest or a dwarf, and people know what you bring. You can make inferences at work, but there's not as much transparency of expertise. There are laws about transparency in business -- privacy rights.

You note certain distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that point toward skills tomorrow's leaders will need. Can we discuss speed Certainly, things can happen more quickly in games. In a game, you might congregate with five people you've just met; you've got one minute to decide who will lead and what the strategy will be, and then the gate opens. So there's a lot more opportunity to do things quickly.

Iteration is an important part of this. In business, we're not going to go to Step 2 until we know we won't fail on Step 5. The default strategy in games is, "That's a good idea; let's try that." Then, wham! "All right, we all die. Let's go left instead of right next time." There's a lot of opportunity to try things a lot of times, and there's value in that: A lot of small failures add up to global success rather than being so careful about each step.

Are gamers less risk-averse in business Tony O'Driscoll has studied several hundred gamers at IBM. It occurs to a majority of them that things happening in these games are similar to and different from real work and useful to think about in real work. People volunteer that they have made that connection.