Not A Blog™

An acquaintance of mine who is big into the online gaming scene recently brought to my attention a new “technology” poised to “revolutionize” the workplace. These are always great. And by “great” I mean “completely retarded”. This time around it’s a combination of two things: 1) the realization, if you will, that online games reflect real-life in terms of certain social-interaction functions, and 2) a new system for making real life work more like online games.

The first bit is a study done by IBM and a software company called Seriosity that concludes MMORPG’s (an acronym I’ve never successfully said in real life) build business leaders. The argument is that gamers learn about collaboration, risk-taking, inter-group politics and all that stuff in the course of getting missions done in games. This, in turn, makes people adept at running businesses. The article I read was exceedingly short on details which, to be frank, doesn’t surprise me. I believe the study was exceedingly short on methodology.

At first glance, this seems to make sense. People are working together and organizing, getting stuff done. They’re obviously successful, and so someone must be learning something about how to deal with people. Unfortunately, there are a number of points to consider which, I believe, serve to drastically reduce the effectiveness of this learned skill set, if not nullify it completely.

First, the study could be just plain wrong. How did the “researchers” determine there was an increase in gamers’ leadership abilities? They asked them. Let me tell you: that’s got accuracy written all over it. Give me a freakin’ break. They asked people in a survey whether or not they thought they improved? The only thing stupider than this is that fully half the people put down that they didn’t think they improved! At least someone was being honest. That’s not to say it doesn’t work for anyone, but the results there are dubious at best. IBM researchers, let me give you a hint: no studies ever suffered from a little scientific method here and there. The very least you could have done was asked people outside the computer industry.

Secondly, have these researchers actually, you know, played online games? I don’t personally do the MMORPG thing. I never really got into World of Eve Quest or whatever kids play these days. But I used to be quite the hard core gamer back in high school and my early college days—when I had copious amounts of free time and disposable income. Even today, I venture out to a great local place (where the LANs are already configured and I just have to show up), and frag a gib or two, so I’m not totally out of the loop, here.

If there are two words I can say about the co-op games I’ve played, they are: Utter and Chaos. Even when it’s Team America versus Communist Terrorists, no one actually cooperates as a team. It’s everyone with his favorite weapon, going off to single handedly wipe out the bad guys. On occasion, two people will hook up and form some semblance of a cooperative to achieve a mid-term goal, but that lasts all of five seconds until one of the two gets killed and has to respawn on the other side of the map.

This has been true every time I’ve played with anyone, ever. In fairness, when I played seven or eight years ago we were all teens, but even today I play with other adults—and everyone still acts like teens. I’m not sure how valuable “leadership skill” is when it consists of:

“Dude. DUDE! No, you have to go in here. No, I’m serious. Come on, listen to me guys, I did this map before—what? Fuck that shit. Use the M-16. No, with the gernade launcher! Jesus Christ. Forget it, dude—hey! Who took the last tank!? You all suck! Screw that, you guys just keep jerking off at the radar tower. I’m just going to walk all the way to the airstrip and take the chopper. Goddamn.”

In a nutshell, that’s every multiplayer co-op game I’ve played. I like to think MMORPG’s are a little more organized, but from what I’ve seen watching other people play them, they’re not. If there’s some sort of important business skill buried in that profanity, well—I guess I’m just not enough of a leader-type to recognize it.

But more importantly, the utter chaos that happens in games doesn’t really get recognized for what it is because there’s no real risk there. I know the study talks about how games prepare one to be a risk-taker, but let’s be honest. They don’t. There isn’t really a real risk in an online game. There’s a lot of inconvenience, but it never impacts your real-life life. Because of this, the game is hugely tolerant of error. It has to be, not just because there are a lot of stupid people playing, but because it’s a game and it’s supposed to be fun. Nobody would play a game where, when you die, you’re dead and that’s it. That’s no fun, and nobody plays games to have not-fun. So in games today, you can screw around all day—you can have your utter chaos—and still get things accomplished with cursing and an utter lack of organization and only the most rudimentary chain of command because the game is extremely forgiving.

That’s not to say some people aren’t super organized and they do a really good job. But those sorts of people are the ones who make a living out of playing games anyway, and so they don’t need to exercise those bulging leadership skills in an office environment. For the rest of us mere mortals, we just don’t do a very good job of playing games. As to how this would then translate into the real world—with it’s real risk and real money on the line? Well maybe I’m hopelessly behind the times, but it seems to me slightly on the foolish side to entrust Leeroy Jenkins with the project management for the $20 million Fooberman account just because he plays some WoW while waiting for his porn to load.

Finally, there’s the whole aspect of what’s causing what, here. Is it really the case that MMORPG’s are cultivating these fantastic proto-leaders—or maybe the low-risk MMORPG environment is what allows these proto-leaders to shine? I think it may be a combination of both: the MMORPG provides a nurturing environ for natural leaders, and so they gravitate towards it, yielding a high concentration of leader types in the game. Just to say that the game causes leaders is a bit of a hasty generalization, methinks.

Now, it’s bad enough that this study got released, but things get worse. (Things always get worse.) The same company that cosponsored the study—Seriosity—is, not surprisingly, the same company who’s flagship product happens to be based on online games’ economies. In other words, the “study” is a fancy method of advertising. That certainly clears things up a bit, while also pointing us to another product to be lampooned.

This product is Attent™. It “…creates a virtual economy for enterprise collaboration and a solution to information overload.” They have a lot of cheesy flash animation with bad VO on their site, but what it basically boils down to is this: it’s a more granular version of Outlook’s email priority function. One thing that’s different, however, is that Attent™® has an “economy” of what they call Serios©™®, which are like electronic currency, kind of, that you attach to messages to increase their importance. In other words, unlike Outlook where you can make every message you send high priority, you can attach as many Serios to a message as you want to increase its importance, but you eventually run out. How you replenish this wasn’t explained in the short video thing I watched, and I wasn’t about to spend any more time watching the others because they’re embarrassing.

On one level, I suppose it does help to avoid the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome. There’s always that one person who sends all their emails with a high priority flag. Obviously this has exactly the opposite effect as they hope. Once you’ve gotten your fifth high priority email full of internet jokes and animated gifs, none of their emails ever have any priority at all—even if they’re legitimately urgent.

But that’s about all Attent does. Aside from how one gets more Serios (stop sending jokes, perhaps? Haha! Ahem. Sorry.), the other question I have is: why penalize people for attaching an urgency to their message? If you’re trying to actually use the system properly (and you send as many emails as I do), either some of these are going to have to go through with no urgency at all, and thereby get ignored, or they go through with some measure of urgency, requiring the use of Serios, which means you now have less if you need to send a truly urgent message. It’s almost like penalizing people just for sending email—which may be the point since they talk about information overload.

Speaking of which, this is the stupidest thing of all. The Attent system is really not intuitive. I spent a good half hour reading the report, reading their website, and watching their flash animations, and I feel as if I only have the most tenuous of grasps on how this thing works. (Where does the Serios come from? Is it set by management? How do you get more? What if you set up a verbal agreement with everyone else in your department to treat a message with zero Serios with importance? Wouldn’t that save a lot of Serios you are otherwise supposed to be using? Would this negatively impact the dynamics of the system?) In other words—all this stuff requires training and instruction on how to use it. It’s another level of office politics everyone now has to play. But what was that one goal of the system again? Something about reducing information overload?

Let me get this straight. The Attent system is designed to reduce information overload by introducing more information!? What?

You don’t make a system easier to use by adding more crap. I will agree that email could use improvement, but improvement does not equal more prioritization when the prioritization we have now doesn’t work.

Besides, if it’s handled anything the way games are handled, the first thing the gamers will do is look for the loophole and exploit it. Combine this with the incredibly high amount of incredulity it’s bound to generate by folks such as, well, me—and you have a perfect storm of disaster.

Though if Seriosity ships a couple hundred units, they’re probably not too concerned about this storm.

-Ted