How WoW Players Benefit From the Game
The amazing online environment called World of Warcraft is no longer viewed merely as a pleasurable pastime nor as an ordinary video game. Of course World of Warcraft is, what is known as, a MMORP. This refers to the fact that it is huge and is played online – Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game. But this is not the reason for it being special. Nor is it because it has 11 million active players!
All the above mentioned reasons are enough to make the magical Warcraft world of Azeroth a unique and wonderful place. However none of them are the reason for the game being so special (at least not in my opinion and the opinion of many business experts. World of Warcraft is special because it can teach children and adults alike real world skills that they can use in their personal, professional and social lives!
The truth is that World of Warcraft (WoW) grabs a players attention for all the usual reasons associated with a computer game. However, before long those same players are learning very real and usable skills that can be deployed at work, in social situations and a multitude of life situations.Think of the opposite of all those stories about how the negative effects of television violence and violent video games are “programming” people to be violent in the real world. Well, when it comes to World of Warcraft the opposite is happening and positive, desirable skills and abilities are “programmed in” and then used in the real world!
Playing at the start of the game is a straight forward affair. As with all similar type of fantasy games you have to perform some simple steps while you play World of Warcraft at lower character levels. These low levels keep World of Warcraft very similar to other games in the same genre.
That’s where the similarities end though because as you get your character up to higher levels the game becomes very challenging.
The variety of the challenges in the game are wide and taxing to even the most astute mind. It is true to say that playing higher levels of WoW give you a serious mental workout!
In WoW it is not just the questing that requires mental effort. When you become involved in combat situations it not just continually hitting a button – you must think about what you are doing and how you plan to do it! The multi-tasking involved and organisational skills need for even the most basic of tasks at the higher levels requires players to hone such skills to such a degree that they naturally seep through into their activities in the everyday world.
Within the game there are opportunities to advance within your guild. Taking on higher ranks and supervisory positions requires a player to develop the type of managerial abilities and skills that corporations pay tens of thousands of dollars teaching to their executives in the real world.
In fact, John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC, says that World of Warcraft is the ideal place for entrepreneurs to hone their skills while many other experts claim that the managerial skills, crowd sourcing and other effective guild member abilities learned in the online World of Warcraft are genuine leadership skills can only be replicated by expensive managerial tuition!
By: Joe O'Reilly
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Filed under Gaming by on Jul 7th, 2010. 