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Thursday 6th December 2007 10:00 am

Rich Halverson: Games and Leadership

Can building pyramids and killing Lokthar the Ice Lord make you a better leader? 

It seems like video games would be a natural environment for developing leadership skills. Video games are great, for example, at teaching players to navigate complex systems. A game such as Civilization IV, for example, gives players a chance to see how access to key resources such as iron and oil or building wonders such as the Pyramids or the Parthenon can alter the course of history. Guild leadership in World of Warcraft and other MMOGs gives a player experience in group dynamics, resources management, and conflict resolution. But can games like Civilization and WoW teach about how to manage and lead complex real-life organizations?

Preparing school leaders

I teach at a school leadership preparation program at UW-Madison. One of our big challenges is to give people practice in developing school leadership skills. This is harder than it seems - leadership is one of those abilities it is very difficult to generalize beyond the specifics of a given situation. In fact, a good definition of leadership might be the ability to “read” what is possible given the people, the resources and the problems in a given domain. Add accountability and special education policies, traditions of teacher autonomy, and students more interested in learning outside schools than inside, and determining the variables involved in simulating school leadership begins to more complex than climate prediction modeling.

Games might not be able to give experience in leading schools directly, but some of the central lessons of school leadership can be experienced in game play. Every school leader realizes one day that she needs to consider the good of the whole organization against the desires of the individual members. This insight signifies a fundamental shift from the advocating a particular point-of-view to balancing competing interests toward the organizational good. In Civilization IV, players begin by building technologies and improvements that appear to provide the most benefit. Soon, however, the threat of invasion or sudden competitive pressure force players to make a choice between resource allocation, citizen happiness, or cultural production. All decisions will be wrong, based on the perceptions of the interested parties involved. Players face consequences in terms of reduced productivity, national vulnerability, or cultural irrelevance based on the hard choices made. Sacrificing the population of a capital city in a draconian attempt to stave off invasion drives home the hard sacrifices necessary to keep a civilization afloat. Of course, this isn’t the same as firing loyal staff members for incompetence, but isn’t the experience of hard decisions without consequences a main feature of game-based learning?

Modeling problem solving

Guild leadership in WoW provides more concrete examples of the inevitable trade-offs leaders must make between individual and group interests. My conversations with Constance Steinkuehler, Andy Phelps and Dan Norton helped me to see how the work of guild leaders consists of two kinds of tasks: guild management and raid leadership. Guild managers allocate rewards, motivate participation, and schedule group activities much the way real-life managers work. Raid leadership involves the discretion-on-the-fly, emergent problem-setting and problem-solving characteristics of leadership-in-action.

Coordinating a team of healers, tanks and damage-dealers to seek out and kill Lokthar the Ice Lord may not appear the same as quelling a middle-school cafeteria outburst or evaluating a struggling teacher. But having a legitimate place to make your management tendencies visible to a group of colleagues, receive feedback both in the form of kibitzing and mission success, and to practice new approaches to planning or rapid-fire problem-solving is a luxury WoW players have that is not true for many school leaders.

There are limits to the analogy between game-based learning and real-life leadership. Like with Vegas, the learning that happens in games stays in games. Learning in-game leadership lessons requires a big time investment - it takes many, many hours of playing WoW or Civ to feel the costs of decision-making that leaders must face. Further, the hunting-killing-plotting-destroying cycle that dominates many types of video-game play may be cathartic, but certainly should not be directly applied to real-life situations. But there are good ways to think about how the lessons learned in games can be made valuable for out-of-game learning. Kurt Squire’s work on Civ IV, for example, argues that educators need to develop third-spaces that bridge in-game learning to out-of-game goals. These spaces help players apply the historical lessons learned in the game to understand other forms of historical conflict, and draw players into using books and the Internet to explain the interaction experienced in the game.

Building bridges from games to the real world could also be developed to draw out conflict resolution and resources allocation lessons for leadership. WoW provides an excellent example of what the next generation of leadership games might look like. WoW already blurs the boundary between real and virtual life by providing a virtual world to facilitate real-life interaction. True, in Lokholar looms in the virtual Alterac Valley, while only restless sixth graders loom in the side hallway, but the features of WoW interpersonal interaction map so well onto the practices of middle school leadership that it might only be a matter of time before leaders can try out schools in the ways Warlocks can try out the Cloak of the Hakkari Warriors.

Editor’s Note: See Jim Gee’s thematic overview & index for more posts in this seven-part series on digital learning and identity.

Category: Ecology-of-Games, Identity

Tags: leadership, mmogs, video-games

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