Life is not only about being productive. You have to entertain yourself as well. (That's not an excuse for not graduating, of course.)

It's interesting that pro-level Magic: the Gathering players seem to almost all go on to have pretty successful professional lives. Maybe just being a physical game draws more well balanced people. Or that it's a solo game, despite teams being important for knowledge sharing at the pro level. Or that there's "down time" between Pro Tours - the number of weekly Grand Prix that are counted towards a season's score are even capped so that pros don't feel obligated to grind points week in and week out. You frequently read about "older" players skipping Pro Tours for exams or work or personal obligations.

It's definitely an interesting question. Games like WoW can be excellent simulations of how to maintain morale in high-stress situations, which is basically what management in the startup world is all about. As a guild leader, you're thrown into the fire of needing to balance a personal touch and sensitivity for each individual team member's needs, against the general goals of the organization. And it's a situation where a growing leader can try different leadership styles and see what works without causing a real-life organization to sink into the ground. Worst case, some people are disappointed, but everyone picks up the pieces.

You learn to use analytics tools (like worldoflogs.com which creates performance graphs based on raid event data) to be able to go up to people and say "hey, I think you can improve by trying X" without making things personal... much like agile startups use data-driven approaches ("velocity" and other metrics) to compartmentalize interpersonal relationships and team performance. With loot distribution, you learn that transparency and trust are key, and that you can set yourself apart in the community as an organization people want to be associated with. You learn how to recruit, how to hire, and even how to fire. And you learn to overcome the stress of making mistakes.

That all said, in order to be at the level where you're leading and learning these lessons as a leader and not a follower, the time sink is necessarily huge. Is the benefit worth the reward? Not for people who already have opportunities to get this experience in "meatspace." But I'd like to think that as technology improves, coding becomes widespread... people who are educated on leadership with the next generation of MMOs will naturally shift towards starting their own startups, and they'll be more successful because of their MMO experience. It's a scalable education system, and as other posters commented, everyone needs fun.

WoW, of course, is optimized for addictiveness, not optimized for teaching these lessons in the shortest amount of time possible. I never played America's Army, nor have I done much research on it, but it seems like at its best moments it became such a leadership training environment. There's a lot of room for exploration of this space.

Further works:

http://www.academia.edu/1317272/Leadership_Style_in_World_of... - plots a spectrum of leadership styles and how different guilds display those traits

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-01-14/how-world-of-... - a bit of a stretch, but has some interesting ideas

This is indicative of how humans relate to each other, more than how people play WoW. Your friend has obviously connected with the people she plays with in WoW on a deep level. That's not a slight on internet relationships, or a commentary on modern online society - it's just an observation on your particular friend's interactions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. And just because she isn't earning millions doing so doesn't mean she isn't an awesome person. I think, if anything, those people who have such devotion to a social group - regardless of that social group's reason for existing - are particularly noble.

In most jobs the tenants of what made WoW so addicting and powerful in its hayday are inapplicable - in WoW, a lot of the game is a skinner box, designed around positive reinforcement of desired collaberative behavior. Especially in the vanilla incarnation. To have that same effect in a workplace, you need tangible and discrete goals, with real rewards for accomplishment.

It actually really translates well into software, and most engineering disciplines, but not well in less productive professions like law or business. Your quest tracker is the issue tracker, your gold reward could be a bug bounty or bonus or team praise. Your sense of accomplishment is in shipping products, the way a guild has a sense of accomplishment for slaying a boss for the first time or clearing a raid.

I think the greatest barriers to this kind of thinking, at least in the domain HN is concerned, is that your goals and objectives are not always discrete and manageable (ie, your quest log has an unknown mob kill requirement) and figuring out the next boss to kill can be difficult.

If you had that information, I think software can really play out like a video game. When I bug fix in the KDE projects it really is a quest, the goals are discrete and the payoff is seeing my changes in the software I use every day. And I have the same feedback loop I had playing WoW from 2005-2009.

I've always liked to imagine a future where games are actually telepresence modules allowing users to mine asteroids using robots, monitor servers in a global cluster and protect them from attack, or run undersea farms here on earth, all from their home and with a sense that they're collaborating on a fun activity with friends.

So instead of skinner boxes trying to get people addicted to pointless tasks and extract money from them for worthless virtual attributes, they'd actually be useful ways to earn a living. Probably instead corporations will find ways to make gamers work for them and earn them more money.

The problem is the person, not the game.

I started leading relatively large guilds and alliances (1000-6000 people) in a few MMOs at age 15. The experience and wisdom I gained from those experiences helped me greatly in my adult life. The games I played were very cutthroat and modeled off real-world politics, diplomacy, espionage, and warfare (the games in question were inspired by EVE and UO; I've also played those two, but not with leadership positions).

I'm now 22 and I frequently see parallels in my working life. I can think of many times I've leveraged some of my past experiences to help make decisions, especially when it comes to big-picture strategic problems.

Yes, it is easy to become extremely addicted to these kinds of games and it's tempting to sacrifice aspects of your personal or working life, but they can also offer a ton of fun and a ton of great learning opportunities. People just need to practice impulse control, and they need to set boundaries ("I won't login until I finish my homework for tomorrow", etc.).

I think MMOs like EVE should receive more study and writing in the scientific community, because it's a perfect example of a microcosm of some of the more "base" nature of human psychology and behavior.

Wow, I played 3056 too (and a few of the other servers that were running at the time). I was briefly head of Kurita, but that happened just as I was transitioning out of college and into working so I had to hand it off pretty quickly.

Mostly what I did was training new people in our pilot school, and we had a fun roleplaying based approach to it. I spend a lot of time at work helping people out too, I think it's just an expression of my personality no matter what the situation is.

I had a lot of fun playing that game. I think one of the highlights was one of the server-wide tournaments that was run, with the prizes being "legendary" character names (and stats). I almost won that. In one of the final rounds, my opponent fell into a hole on a treacherous map with level 9 cliffs on it before a single shot was fired. I took a "role playing" approach to it and allowed him to restart because it wasn't an honorable win. I was winning the re-match until I got taken out by a BS engine crit. Oh well.

Much as in life, you aren't competing versus the game - you're competing versus the other players. If you only put the minimum amount of work in to level up, you're never going to stand out.

This is my quibble against WoW and the like. I had a lot of growth experiences in a much more brutal environment, a game called Tibia. I haven't heard any MMO as unforgiving, specially in it's early days. A single death costs you about 15% of your total play time (you lose items, experience, all there is to lose basically). Killing someone usually held a profit.

As a kid, it meant you would play hours and hours and get beaten repeatedly. You'd lose everything and then you'd have to find motivation to do better next time. You would find friends and nurture relationships because you needed and later because you found you really enjoyed them. Eventually, you would find you can kill for fun and profit, completely destroying weeks or months of a fellow player. It's a sort of Bottom-Up introduction on how civilizations form, because some time you realize the instabilities associated with violence (or, depending on your personality, just compassion from your repeated deaths). Protection networks formed -- killing someone might get you hunted. Guilds were the next step in this protection network, with huge political intricacies such as necessity of protecting some members which may or may not be in a morally justifiable position to maintain the position of power of the Guild.

I could go on. Some of the smartest people I know and many of my best friends played the game in their youth; I wouldn't say it made who they are, but if it didn't it surely provided an amazing opportunity to learn some thing you don't really do until a much later age, if ever.