Today's Gamers, Tomorrow's Leaders?

slash-sa writes "Video games have become problem-solving exercises wrapped in the veneer of an exotic adventure. In today's fast and rapidly-changing business environment, the strategic skills they teach are more important than ever. From realistic battlefield simulations to the building of great nations, from fantastic voyages through worlds of mythology to conquering space, "Generation G" could well offer the answer to unlocking great 21st century strategists and leaders."

played online games much?

[timmarhy]

If these people are the best and brightest we are fingered. play WoW sometime and you'll see.

That's all well and good...

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

Maybe video games teach problem solving skills, but equally important in the business world is paying attention to things that aren't an orgy of colors. In the end problem solving only comes after analysis, and video games aren't teaching that.

Suspension of disbelief

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The idea that you can train someone to disassociate the "person" from the "target" is well known and well applied in the modern military. Especially in the modern American military where nighttime raids are carried out in pitch darkness with only moving infrared blips representing the fleeing victims of computer-guided missiles, such disassociation has reached a very high level.

By getting kids into games earlier, and especially into games which allow multiple "lives" with very little cost for respawn, we can teach them to better separate their feelings towards others from their actions.

I can see only good things for military planning and warmaking coming from this.

Hmmmm...

[porcupine8]

Transferring knowledge acquired in one context to another is a pretty hard problem. "Problem solving," "reasoning," and "critical thinking" skills seem to be one of the hardest things to transfer. Just because you're really, really good at logic problems doesn't mean you'll approach other things in life with the same logic all the time. I have to wonder how much these game-learned skills will really transfer to the business world; it would probably depend on there being enough surface similarities between a game situation and a business situation to act as a trigger.

Another point not mentioned in the article is that, yes, these people are more used to working in groups thanks to MMOGs and such. But group work is also far, far more prevalent in schools (from kindergarten straight through college math classes) than it was 20, even 10 years ago. More and more, students come out of school being thoroughly used to working in groups, delegating tasks, collaborating on the final product, etc. Some of this has been due to bottom-up pressure from educational researchers saying this works well, some of it has been top-down pressure from employers saying that this is a skill they want in their workforce. Either way, I'm not sure you can give video games all of the credit.

Not all games are a riot of colours and violence

[zevans]

Yet for some reason after only 11 comments the dicussion is already focused on these... what does this tell us about the slashdot readership?

OTOH, I for one welcome our BFG-toting million-polygon new overlords.

Hmph, I might change my title from Services Director to Services Masterchief.

Re:That's all well and good...

[geeknado]

That depends entirely on the game in question, don't you think? Most strategy games involve some degree of risk analysis, even RTSs. Turn-based games require constant revision of both short term and long term strategies to react to opponent's moves. The systems involved are generally far more complicated than most business problems.

Re:played online games much?

[javakah]

Except that this is not unrealistic. Just as in WoW, the world has plenty of idiots.

WoW is not necessarily bad leadership experience when you get into organizing raids.

Some notable leadership experience from WoW raids:

1. Learning how to pick team members. This includes avoiding the tons of idiots out their and fostering relationships with competent people. Additionally it forces you to figure out what skill sets are needed and available at a given time, and for you to know how different people work together.

2. Planning. Large raids take some work for getting people willing to work on a project (the raid), and do not come together instantly. You must plan out ahead of time when you are going to do things to allow people to work it into their schedule.

3. Evaluation of goals and performance. If your project (raid) fails, you must take a step back and figure out what went wrong and to come up with a strategy to avoid that problem.

4. Dealing with underperformers with tact. Yes, there are some people who just aren't quite holding up their ends of things. Sometimes they are just bad players who don't care, who should perhaps not be a part of your team anymore. Other times however, they desperately want to do better, but aren't sure. In such situations, as in life, you need to sit down with them in a non-confrontational way and talk about the problem, and work with them on how to improve. As in life, the individual and the team will improve.

5. Dealing with team morale. Things don't always go well, but you almost always have to see some good aspects of what the team is doing to let the team know that (while at the same time identifying ways to improve). When the team does a good job, you need to make sure they know that you know that they did a good job.

6. Dealing with life conflicts. People have (hopefully) lives outside of WoW, as they have lives outside of work. You have to understand that situations come up, and people can't always be where they have said they will be. At the same time, there has to be consequences for people who are complete flakes.

So, I'm not sure that WoW is actually a bad leadership training ground.

Re:Suspension of disbelief

[Shadow of Eternity]

Put a 3 year old in a room with a punching bag shaped like a person and have an adult walk in and punch it. The 3 year old will learn it is okay to hit punching bags. Take that 3 year old and put him in another room with a real person that looks just like the punching bag. The 3 year old will not punch the person because the person is not a punching bag that LOOKS like a person.

Call it the Magic Circle Effect, or Context, or even Loretta's Green Biscuit of +1 Trousers if you want. As long as someone is capable of telling the difference between reality and a videogame they won't learn to kill people from playing Crysis. If someone can't tell the difference... well, they shouldn't be outside of a padded room to begin with, what on earth are they doing playing videogames.

Curious, why don't you mention the other way

[SmallFurryCreature]

Calling your enemies dogs and infidels, inferior beings who deserve to die because God said so? That has worked very well in the past and is still actively used.

Getting your own side to view the enemy as less then human, yeah lets blame that on the americans and video games, it is not like that hasn't happened since mankind decided there was US and THEM.

Get off my lawn...again

[Trenchbroom]

Why would this be a 21st century phenomenon? In my ancient opinion games today are easier and more linear then yesterday's finest (and it didn't get us anywhere, did it?).

Try to have a kid today figure out one of Infocom's or Sierra's best adventure games from the 80's...they neither have the patience nor the attention span for it.

A kid today trying to play twelve hours of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended [wikipedia.org]? No chance for the future.

An engineer would never produce such a system

[hey!]

for producing problem solving leaders, for the simple reason that the supply of individual problem solving ability has always exceeded the number of leadership slots. The real difficulty is getting the problem solving individuals into those slots, then training them on how to exploit their problem solving capabilities in the real world.

There are two kinds of people: those who want to find a good enough solution as quickly as possible, and those who want to find the best solution and are willing to take as long as it takes. Neither extreme is right. Their's an art to making decisions, and much of that art is knowing when you don't have enough facts, and when gathering more facts will put you behind the pace at which a situation develops.

An effective problem solving leader not only has to find an artful compromise, he has to find a way to make it work where everybody who has to make it happen has a different idea of what the ideal compromise should be. In other words a problem solving leader has to build a flexible, problem solving organization. President Clinton was not my idea of a great president (unless we grade on a curve), but he had a saying that is very true that went something like this: people are policy.

I think computer games have some value in training problem solving, but I don't think they will produce a generation of superior problem solvers, so much as give superior problem solvers of the generation a different and not necessarily superior set of games than their predecessors. Imagine that one of the presidential candidates was a master of three games: chess, poker and bridge. Wouldn't that be just as intriguing as if he were a master of FPS games, strategy games and tetris?

Re:My problem with this...

[nine-times]

Agreed. The idea that you'll learn to problem-solve from gaming might be a bit off. Besides the save/reload thing you mentioned, there's the fact that games usually have you solve problems using set methods. There is a set way to solve a puzzle, and there's a set way to kill the monster.

When you have to solve real problems, you start to figure out that there aren't clear solutions laid out for you. Usually, there isn't "a solution", but instead an infinite number of possible partial solutions, none of which solve the problem entirely, all of which introduce new problems, and none of which are all that certain to work. You just have to pick the one that you think is best, and hope that your judgement is good.

I'd agree that puzzles are good for keeping your brain active. I'd agree that games can help teach strategy. But as for problem solving skills, often enough you need someone who can "think outside the box" (I know it's a cliché, but it's true!). Games usually teach you specifically to think inside the box and follow the set rules, so I'm just not so sure it's good training for problem-solving.

Kids on WoW aren't the only gamers

[razorh]

I've seen a lot of posts here going on about the pasty faced kids or 30somethings locked away in their parents bedrooms etc. and the total lack of social skills. This isn't always the case and from some of the things I have seen from playing online games for 10-15 years now I can see some very real similarities between the business world and running long term guilds. I'm not talking about organizing a few raids in WoW, I'm talking about what it takes to start and keep a guild running for more than a few months. I'm currently in an EQ guild that was started about 6-7 years ago and the behind the scenes headaches of keeping 50-80 people (and these are people who are generally 20-45, not 12yr old kids) 'happy' aren't trivial. When you have that many people with their own agendas and personalities, managing them all, coming up with rules/guildlines/policies and enforcing them (and once again, these are people that average in age to be around 25-30 who are intelligent, employed and married in many cases) is VERY much like trying to run a business and balancing your employee's wants and needs against what you need to keep your business afloat.

sorry, I suck at spelling, I'm sure someone will point out all my mistakes.

Re:played online games much?

[KevMar]

Very well said. As a raid leader now, you are in charge of 30-35 people. Not only do you have to make all the decisions and choises listed, but you also have to deal with personal drama and loot distrobution. You realy have to build a team to make it work. If you randomly pick people and make sloppy decisions. People will question your leadership and stop fallowing you.

You also get all kinds of drama that you have to deal with while your leading your crew.
"why am I not in the raid"
"I can only raid on Wed so save me a spot"
"I called in sick to be here, cant i get in?"
"I am the best choice for that type of item, I should get it by default"
"I have to go eat supper, later" or "i'll be back in 15"
"I know im an hour late, Cant I get in"
"no i didnt sign up, but im a better player that him, bring me in"
"Why didnt my friend get in"
"I hate you because you killed a new boss and I was on reservres to a new guy"
it goes on and on.

Re:played online games much?

[timeOday]

Learning in a low-stress environment isn't necessarily a bad thing, it allows you to experiment and learn from repetition without dying or going out of business the first time you fail. Granted, that in itself will not prepare you to be President, but we're talking about kids here aren't we? It's a first step.

Ha.

[SatanicPuppy]

No, it's worse than that...The people that are in power now, were the rebels back then. The damn president did cocaine and dodged the draft! For someone of his social class, that's as hippy as it gets.

It's always tempting to think that there must have been this other group of evil people who took over from the idealists and peaceniks, but the truth of it is, it's all the same people. They got older, they got good jobs, and they sold out to the system.

Were chess players yesterday's leaders?

[dpbsmith]

Chess has been a popular metaphor for war, life, strategic thinking, etc. for centuries, but I don't recall many national leaders drawn from the ranks of the Laskers, Capablancas, and Fischers.

Football (both U. S. and Rugby) are often thought to be good training for leadership. Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, famously did not "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," but even if he had, I don't think there's much evidence for correlation between football prowess and skill at national leadership.

As with football, to the extent that video gaming is ubiquitous among today's youth, it is vacuously true that our future leaders will probably have played video games, with varying degrees of skill.

But in seeking our future leaders, one might just as well look to today's [ cell phone users | Harry Potter fans | bottled water drinkers ].

Re:played online games much?

[C0rinthian]

I wouldn't follow you because you type like an idiot. The ability to communicate effectively is not reserved for 'grammer majors'. If you are too lazy to do so, then why should anyone spend time reading what you type?

Yes, the "This isn't school so I don't have to type good" mentality drives me up a wall.