Video Games Can Boost Your Career

According to this Forbes article (via Yahoo! Games), video games can teach valuable leadership and strategy skills. Yeah, anyone who’s picked up a tactical shooter or an RPG knows that to be true. Elliot Noss, CEO of domain provider Tucows trains six to seven hours a week to improve his leadership skills by playing World of Warcraft.

“You have these events [in "World of Warcraft"] that are very leadership-driven,” Noss says. “For example, when you’re in a raid that’s poorly led, it’s really easy to see how valuable are skills like managing the social dynamic, making sure there was the right level of preparation and making sure that there was a clear hierarchy in terms of who is performing what roles.”

He applies something like WOW backdrop for his company. There’s no cosplay, but he does conduct a lunchtime series called “Tucow’s Lore”, in which he plays the company poet and sings the tales of the company’s heroes, villains, and battles with mythological monsters (large telecommunications companies). Not every corporate executive can pull that off without the rank and file employees rolling their eyes, but it seems to be working for Noss. He has seen employee satisfaction rise and turnover decrease.

“We’re finding that the younger people coming into the teams who have had experience playing online games are the highest-level performers because they are constantly motivated to seek out the next challenge and grab on to performance metrics,” says John Hagel III, co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte. He has been studying how playing video games affect the performance of young professionals at work.

There are numerous benefits games have on career oriented professionals. The trial and error nature of a lot of games can teach you how to learn from mistakes and not be afraid to take risks. Players also are presented with unexpected challenges that force improvisations or find solutions to problems creatively. As gamers, haven’t you noticed that instruction manuals provide only the bare basics to play and that you seek out new challenges in order to progress? How does that not translate into the workplace? Of course, the competitive aspect helps too.

Entrepreneurship is another possibility with games. In 2004 a man names David Storey bought a virtual island in the online game “Project Entropia” for real world money for $26,500. He now makes $100,000 per year in taxes he charges hunters on the island. That’s $100,000 in real money he’s making on property that only exists on the digital realm.

So go ahead and play World of Warcraft at work. Tell your boss you’re building leadership skills.