The
report "Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders: Onilne games put the future of
business leadership on display" poses an important question: "as the
business world becomes more distributed an virtual, do online games offer
lessons on the future of leadership?" The researchers from IBM and MIT
Sloan School of Business assert that gaming behaviors can be closely linked to
real life business decisions, especially the leadership portion of business
decisions. This specific report focuses on the nature of leadership in MMORPG
environment, where leadership happens instantly and quickly. Often, game users
assume leadership positions when they collaboratively work for a shared task
among group of game users. When a leader is incapable of exhibiting leadership
qualities in the games, and hence fail to lead the group closer towards the
goal or any quest, then that leader's position is usurped by other participants
in the game, who decide to step up for the group and show improved leadership
quality that will eventually expedite the process that the previous leader has
failed to do so. The researchers mention that 75 percent of the game players in
the IBM case study believe online gaming techniques and approaches can
definitely aid the improvement of their real life leadership effectiveness.
Various tools of communications within many online games such as
World of Warcraft and Diablo series include instant messaging, online chats,
online forums, voice chatting, and many more. Through these diversified
communication channels allow leaders in gaming experience to exert their
leadership qualities. In short, online gaming environments assist the
reinforcement of leadership qualities through project-focused organizations,
numerous "real-time" sources of information in and outside of the
game itself, incentive systems, different means of communications, and apparent
skills and qualifications of every participants. 
There is another report that deals with the same two crucial topics
of leadership and gaming industry. The report "Leadership in a Distributed
World: Lessons from Online Gaming" is also generated by IBM's human
capital management department. The report believes that the future of work and
leadership can definitely garner some insights from MMORPGs. The report focuses
on the correlation between the concepts of work and play. Researches from IBM
and MIT show that working and online gaming share numerous similarities. Also,
the report states that in the contemporary world we live in, leadership can be
categorized as a temporary phenomenon, task oriented quality, and an instantly
varying quality. Such characteristics are easily identifiable in the leaders we
find in the online gaming environments.
Such similarities are: bringing together large
number of people in complex environment; allowing participants to self-organize
and develop skill sets that fit different situations; requiring users to take
risks; making the users accept defeat and/or failure; providing rooms for
developing and utilizing new and existing methods of communication; and many
more. The report elaborates this idea by introducing four critical leadership
qualities, which are visioning, evaluating, collaborating, and executing. The
publishers of this report notes that in "overall, leadership behaviors
appear to be relevant in both gaming and corporate environments."
The report also offer us insights on virtual
leaders. Virtual leaders must develop trust among the group of people who "may
never physically interact." The leaders will definitely have to utilize
available data to make quick and concise decisions, as well as being prepared
to make necessary edits to their leadership decisions in the midst of the
projects, raids, or missions they lead. To conclude, this report believes that
online gaming gives us a great assistance in developing a better work
environment for many organizations.
This is an assignment from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Collaborative Computing. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc
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