Today I stumbled on a post on Yahoo (via Slashdot) called How Playing Video Games can Boost Your Career. The article is pretty general – it talks about a couple of different video game genres – but it also mentions World of Warcraft.

Now, WoW gets a lot of bad press for being an addictive tinksink, and while that may be true, there are some worthwhile skills there to be learned as long as the game is played with moderation. I don’t play WoW anymore, but I did play the game for about four years, off and on. The Yahoo post didn’t cover everything I think feel like I there is to be learned from WoW – there’s a few things it missed. So here we go:

Persistence

MMORPGs in general, and WoW in particular, are designed to keep you playing for long periods. Their revenue model is subscription based, so the longer they can keep you playing, the more money they make. While this may seem nefarious at first (and it certainly can be, if not kept in check), after months and years spent playing working toward in-game rewards, I found it much easier to focus and work singularly on creative projects. I don’t know if I’d have completed half of the creative projects I’ve finished without learning what it meant to sit there, day after day, and slowly grind something to completion. This is a skill I knew before, but WoW brought me to a whole new level. The ironic thing is, once WoW taught me all that persistence, I realized I had better things to while away the hours than play WoW. Go figure.

Research and Planning

There are aspects to WoW’s gameplay that require obscure knowledge of in-game items, locations, and game mechanics. Some of the game’s battle and character systems are so convoluted that it takes complicated algebra and mathematics to determine which in-game item is better to improve a character. While this may be a flaw for the game itself, for the players, these convoluted systems encourage extensive web research, planning, and the ability to analyze vast quantities of technical and jargon-filled information. WoW is its own world – you don’t just play it, you live in it – the ability to find out what you need quickly using the research tools you have available is essential to succeeding in the game. I’ve found these research skills carry easily to other knowledge areas – picking up jargon via in-context immersion is a skill WoW encouraged.

Leadership and Organization

I spent several months in the game as a member of guild leadership, organizing twenty-five people several times a week to conquer in-game objectives. Some of these objects require all 25 people to work in tandem for fifteen minutes straight, with every member needing to know their role and individual responsibilities for the entire fifteen minutes, changing their role every few seconds. Organizing this many people over the internet with only voice and text communication tools  is incredibly taxing, but also teaches valuable leadership, organizational, and motivational skills.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Strategy

Much of WoW’s gameplay involves reacting to stressors in a timely manner with a situation-tailored response. This sounds dry when phrased like that, but I can phrase it more interestingly, too: the best part of playing WoW is trying to figure out how to react in the span of half a second when a gigantic fire-breathing dragon is charging your ass, half your teammates are dead, and you have two minutes before he goes berserk and kills everyone else, costing your team thirty minutes of progression and maybe putting off the encounter for another week. You better make the right choices.

The thing that differentiates MMORPGs from other types of games is that the tools the player has to solve any situation rarely change (maybe once every year, after an expansion). The rest of the time, the player uses the same abilities in different ways. Snap choices must be made, based on familiarity with the problems, tools, and team members. At the highest levels of play, encounters must be strategized for, execution must be practiced, and all team members must be able to think on-the-fly to make good choices. This ability to plan ahead and think on your feet while dealing with stress translates well to other situations.

Have I missed any?