Massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are online computer role-playing games in which a potentially huge number of players interact with one another all within a virtual world. What do these “games” have to do with teaching leadership you ask?
Well IBM is actually teaching leadership (mostly to GenXers now, soon to be more and more Millennials) via these online games. You can see why by reading one of their recent reports “Leadership in a Distributed World: Lessons from Online Gaming.” Obviously “Big Blue” and many others have done the “demographic math” to realize we’re really not doing a very good job developing future leaders. A recent IBM Global Human Capital Study titled: Looming Leadership Crisis, Organizations Placing Their Companies’ Growth Strategies at Risk shares the reality that’s driving more virtual reality learning.
Ian Bogost and his thought-provoking, issue-understanding, Persuasive Games and Water Cooler Games designs, builds, and distributes electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism. His work has been featured in The New York Times Online edition and might lend itself to teaching leadership via simulation gaming. One you will want to check out is Fatworld, which is a game about the politics of nutrition—exploring the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the U.S.
