Reflections of raid leadership

I had the opportunity the other day to give a talk in game in World of Warcraft for the R U Game series by the Games and public libraries group which was a real blast. Although the attendance was light, my friend and colleague Mark Chen did jump on, and along with the series host Ellen Forsyth we had a rather excellent conversation about everything from my work on guild leadership, to games as texts, and more. One thing that came up, as it invariably does, was the question of leadership skill transfer between WoW and other settings.

Since my research didn't focus on the actual transfer question, I never have a very good answer when this issue arises. However, the pilot for my dissertation which I conducted with Seann Dikkers did offer a tantalizing hint of how the the activities of raid and guild leadership can inform leadership activities in other settings. In the study we interviewed both education professionals and students who had experience in guild leadership and asked them to discuss ways in which those experiences have or have not influenced their capacities as leaders outside of the game.

In our analysis Seann and I used a light based metaphor to theorize that guild leaders engage in reflection or refraction in relation to their in-game experiences. Essentially, refraction involves analysis of leadership experiences and intentional mapping of those elements to leadership tasks, while reflection involves mobilizing in-game experiences to reframe out-of-game experiences in the moment.

One of our subjects offered a particularly powerful instance of reflection on WoW while facing a conflict situation in her role as school principal. While I've included it as an appendix in my dissertation, I've decided that it's also worth making available here on my blog. Although this is an anecdotal account, I've found that it resonates with a great many MMO players I've talked to.

So I’m sitting in a student study committee one morning, and the counselor walks in . . . and he throws an absolute temper tantrum, in this morning meeting, that just came out of the blue. And we’re sitting here looking at this going, ‘what is going on with this?’, and the guy gets totally irate and we’re having to bring this kid back in to this meeting, and (he’s) swearing in the meeting which is totally out of character, and just doing a meltdown, in the meeting. So I’m kind of looking at this going, okay fine I’m gonna have some backfill work to do with the committee, talking to people, pulling things back together to finish it. So, we finish the meeting, kind of pull it back together (to where) it’s fine and we’ve gotta get moving, and I leave the conference room and I come out into the office, and my partner the assistant principal is walking through the door doing another meltdown, and I’m sitting there going ‘of course, this is about right’ (laughs) and I’m looking at him and I’m going, okay so the assistant principal here is my main tank, the councilor is my OT (off tank) just had a melt down, heals go to the main tank and I can carry the raid and (laughing) we can pull through it.

It helped me prioritize immediately where my energy needed to go to control the situation. And it was just one of those, juxtapositions of a raiding situation in a school environment and I thought, ‘of course that just makes the perfect, the OT’s just gonna have to suck it up and if he has to die he goes down, but we have to carry the main tank’

and it was just one of those funny things . . . and getting into the raiding environment it helps me see, a very interesting clarification in my mind of the functions that people provide in different organizations. It isn’t always quite that clear, but it does help me see some of the divisions and to monitor some of that . . . but that one situation was the clearest in my mind, and I’ve shared it with different people who play WoW and they all just say ‘wow I get it immediately.'