Seriosity has prepared a report for IBM examining how MMOs develop skills essential to future business and the parallels between corporate leadership and leadership in MMO games.
Complex multiplayer online games foreshadow new possibilities for effective leadership and the future of work. An increasingly large portion of game play is collaborative and strategic, and it requires sustained interactions with several players. The engagement of games and the lessons they foster may influence a new gamer generation to expect real work that better resembles the structure of complex play.
This project observed leadership in complex online games to allow a comparison between current leadership models and leadership in the games. We began with a contemporary model of leadership, The Sloan Leadership Model, which defines leadership in four dimensions - Sensemaking, Inventing, Relating and Visioning. The project goal was to see if the Sloan model, and by extension, other traditional models of leadership, need to be changed to account for game play.
Observations included 50+ hours of game play, compiled into 11 movies illustrating different leadership issues. We also included first-hand reports from 6 expert players, 10 interviews with recognized guild leaders, and 171 respondents to an online open-ended survey about leadership in games.
Read the full report here.
