Recently, I was trying to get in touch with a Senator in Chile and tried calling him multiple times, but without success. A couple of hours after my last call, he called me back and explained, saying that he had been in the middle of a battle and could not leave. Was it a political battle? No. It was a battle engagement on the MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), World of Warcraft.
The former Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur and current Senator is exploring how to use games as opportunities for training and developing people in a variety of what he calls "core human skills" such as management, leadership, and learning to learn. He is setting up a wide variety of experiments: promoting WiFi in small towns, educating across social organizations, and promoting his approach among corporate executives and entrepreneurs in many industries.
After our conversations, I felt that I was out of touch with something important. I went with a colleague to the math department at UC Berkeley where we met a graduate student who was studying Algebraic Geometry and Combinatorics, and who was also a competent WoW player. She had played for three years, had multiple characters she played, but was most advanced in her warrior character, who she had played for about 70 hours and was on the verge of being a 70 (the highest level).
We watched her play and asked questions for a couple of hours. The entire game, she collaborated with other members of her guild, once at the request of a member with less experience to help him complete a task, and once as the way to get through an "instance" that five members of her guild needed to complete to advance.
The screen contained a lot of information that she constantly was assessing. She was able to do things very fast, at the same time as talking to us about what she was doing. She and her teams quickly and efficiently assessed the styles of the different players, the dynamic constraints of the technological environment, the efficiences of various strategies, and how her team was able to understand and work with each other's strengths and weaknesses.
She told us about the practice some people have of buying characters that are at a higher skill level without having worked up to that level. Often, the gamers knew who hadn't spent time in the game and instead who had purchased their skill; they were unable to collaborate with other members of their teams in an efficient and seamless way and were liabilities.
There are many modalities to play this game that basically evolve with the tastes and creativity of the players. There are more than 8.5 million people playing this game in the world, organized around multiple servers that allow player against environment or player against player, role-playing (playing as if you were the character in the movements, in the instances, and also in the coordination of the game with the other players), or playing the game as if you were a person at a computer who is playing the game with multiple characters.
Our interviewee said that she had more than a dozen characters in multiple servers to try different ways of engaging with the game. However, one of the main reasons for this diversity was to be in touch with multiple friends. So the game is a very social experience. The team members coordinate their time zones and they meet each other to hang out with their horde peers or alliance peers. They share tools, devices, and financial resources. They criticize each other, make recommendations, learn together. She plays her main character the majority of the time with a guild that consists of 400 people, 20-30 who she knows pretty well, including their character styles, resources, and the personality of the gamer.
And so we left the meeting seeing that these MMOGs are becoming an increasingly rich space in which to develop identities in worlds that we share with others. And that is what being human is all about.
