I don’t disagree much with your post (my only complaint is that fun is a reasonable goal in and of itself, and if someone chooses that, then so be it). However my objection is to Blow’s (amongst many others’) characterisation of the game and the players. Contrary to his thesis, being smart and adept are actually massively rewarded in WoW by comparison to other games; nearly everybody who plays the game is aware of the best players. There is a lot of status up for grabs just by being the best on a server, let alone best in the world.
Accepting his analysis at its face value would lead you to conclude that there are no lessons you can take from WoW or other MMOs. In fact, to me WoW demonstrates ways in which people can be motivated to work upon hard, mathematical problems. It would be a shame if people were to dismiss it off hand, when it has the potential to demonstrate how to structure hard work to make it more palatable and attractive to tackle.
I know several people who used to be the best players on a particular WoW server—they said it was generally boring and not really as prestigious as one might expect, since the sheer number of servers out there means that being the best on one doesn’t even necessarily mean you’re all that good at the game as a whole.
I suppose it would depend on the makeup of your particular server. Though we were nowhere near world best, my guild had decent competition on our server and there was always need to strive to be the first to win an encounter. Both groups were reasonably well known on the server, and I would reasonably often have people messaging me out of the blue.
To try to generalise the post a bit better, I think the lesson from this is that to encourage rational analysis and quick thinking in important areas it’s important to have good competition, an easily verified criteria for ‘winning’, preferably milestones towards the ultimate goal, and a reward for winning whether status or monetary. Off the top of my head, the people behind the X-Prizes seem to have used this model well to encourage innovation in select areas.
I don’t disagree much with your post (my only complaint is that fun is a reasonable goal in and of itself, and if someone chooses that, then so be it). However my objection is to Blow’s (amongst many others’) characterisation of the game and the players. Contrary to his thesis, being smart and adept are actually massively rewarded in WoW by comparison to other games; nearly everybody who plays the game is aware of the best players. There is a lot of status up for grabs just by being the best on a server, let alone best in the world.
Accepting his analysis at its face value would lead you to conclude that there are no lessons you can take from WoW or other MMOs. In fact, to me WoW demonstrates ways in which people can be motivated to work upon hard, mathematical problems. It would be a shame if people were to dismiss it off hand, when it has the potential to demonstrate how to structure hard work to make it more palatable and attractive to tackle.
I know several people who used to be the best players on a particular WoW server—they said it was generally boring and not really as prestigious as one might expect, since the sheer number of servers out there means that being the best on one doesn’t even necessarily mean you’re all that good at the game as a whole.
I suppose it would depend on the makeup of your particular server. Though we were nowhere near world best, my guild had decent competition on our server and there was always need to strive to be the first to win an encounter. Both groups were reasonably well known on the server, and I would reasonably often have people messaging me out of the blue.
To try to generalise the post a bit better, I think the lesson from this is that to encourage rational analysis and quick thinking in important areas it’s important to have good competition, an easily verified criteria for ‘winning’, preferably milestones towards the ultimate goal, and a reward for winning whether status or monetary. Off the top of my head, the people behind the X-Prizes seem to have used this model well to encourage innovation in select areas.