In this era of innovation, learning and change, the pressure to perform have become stronger than ever. The knowledge we have today is outdated tomorrow and and the challenge to innovate is a never ending struggle. Bring any of these topics up in a board meeting, and you are flooded with training programs. The problem with training programs is that they are only effective at transferring knowledge, not inspiring your employees. How do we stimulate and encourage innovation, learning, and change in a business world riddled with tradition and outdated approaches? Businesses should use World of Warcraft to help with training. To answer this most pressing question, I urge business owners to look to World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online game (MMO). Surprisingly, many business owners have never heard of WoW, and many who have look at it as a wasted hobby of 10 million plus "mindless children," a stereotype gamers have struggled with shaking off. In fact, the average player in the US is around 34 years of age and invests about 23 hours per week playing the game (Yee). In WoW, performance is measured in terms of damage per second (DPS), healing per second (HPS), and survivability. These can be recorded with addon's like Recount or Skada, which lets you compare performance fight to fight immediately to see where you need improvement. Websites like World of Logs allow you to upload your logs to the internet for a more indepth analysis of your
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performance compares you to the rest of the world. Knowing which buttons to push, at what time, and in a given scenario can give you a dramatic increase in your ability to perform a given task. The degree of complexity and challenge increases dramatically as you advance through dungeons and raids toward the ultimate goal of their heroic counterparts. “Experienced players become adept at leveraging the resources available in and around WoW to learn faster and advance faster even as the challenges become more difficult. In contrast to the diminishing returns to learning that we often encounter in business, players in WoW appear to have joined an environment where there are increasing returns to learning.” (Hagel) As is the nature of any new and cutting edge, the sticky haze of fear and doubt can make it hard to make a connection to the world of business. WoW uses an environment that encourages rapid learning without the feeling of having to regurgitate the information as you would in a training session at work. Many of the approaches used by WoW could be very helpful to businesses as looking to rapidly improve performance among their people. A great example is how WoW allows anyone to join feel accomplished through relatively simple tasks, and as the tasks begin to get more challenging players have to improvise or innovate to overcome them. WoW provides players with system of performance tracking through experience points, levels, and achievements that can be later accessed and assessed by the player or anyone interested in the progress of that player. “Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is not to be rewarded but to improve.” (Brown) Corporations have yet to bring this concept to the table, save for giving a handful of select members the ability to monitor a relatively small number of portions of the company.What if every
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member of a business had access to this information? What would happen if you could track the uptodate performance of every employee, as well as the performance of each individual group within the business? WoW helps players to focus their innovations by granting everyone the ability to access this information WoW designers built in detailed performance metrics specific to the individual, the role, and the guild. These provide a foundation for regular afteraction reviews where all the participants come together after a
