Lessons From The Black Temple

When I was a baby engineer, I was quite happy just being left to my own devices to solve problems using the power of code. Sometimes it was my code, sometimes it was other people's code, it didn't really matter.

However, over the course of the last eight years or so, that shifted towards less directly doing things and more leading groups of people who were doing things.

I don't think that's a particularly unusual progression, though if you'd asked me many years ago if this was where I would end up, I would probably have glared at you and then sullenly drifted off into my dark corner to go code some more.

I'm sure a bunch of stuff happened to me over those eight years that helped me to grow and mature as a human being. One who was willing to be placed into positions of leadership.

No doubt there were a lot of things that happened to me over that period of time that made the leadership roles more palatable. So many that I doubt I could really catalogue them all.

I think I can catalogue at least one though, which was the amount of time I spent playing Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMO's).

In case you can't tell, this is another one of those stream of consciousness blog posts that I do when I still want to make a post for the week, but I don't necessarily want to put a lot of effort into it.

Anyway, back to the topic, MMO's are games where you share an experience with hundreds, sometimes thousands of other players. They are unique in that the world that you are part of continues to move and change, even when you're not involved.

They are simultaneously the source of some of the best and worst gaming experiences that you can have.

They can be great when you meet new people, make friends with them and work together to conquer challenges that you could not possibly have surmounted alone.

They can be terrible when you meet new people and the combination of a semi-competitive environment along with the cloak of anonymity combines to create an intensely hostile and unpleasant interaction.

Or, as Penny-Arcade so eloquently put it way back in 2004:

Anyway, I've played a lot of MMO's over the years, but the one I spent the most time on was World of Warcraft.

I assume at this point that basically everyone who has interacted with the internet has heard of World of Warcraft. It wasn't the first big MMO, but it was definitely the biggest MMO at various points in time.

Now, at a glance, playing an MMO like World of Warcraft doesn't really force you to exhibit leadership. Most of the time you're plodding along, doing your own thing, with stretches of needing to work with other people to get stuff done.

That's more collaboration than leadership.

Until you get to the pinnacle content of the game that is, otherwise known as raiding.

Up until that point, the biggest group that you needed to put together to achieve something meaningful was no more than a handful of fellow players.

Five, maybe ten if you include some of the early endgame dungeons like Scholomance and Stratholme, when they were still tuned for larger groups.

But the first real raid was Molten Core, which required a whopping forty people to beat.

Well, technically, you didn't actually need that many, because this was still in the very early days of World of Warcraft when you could have like fifty percent of your raid be dead weight and still manage to come out on top, but it was still surprisingly difficult to find twenty competent people.

I raided a little in the early days of World of Warcraft, but I didn't do anything more than participate, rocking up, hitting things with my weapons and generally getting fancy treasure for my effort.

But as the game progressed, so did I.

By the time the second expansion (Burning Crusade) introduced the Black Temple, I was all in.

I was a raid leader.

And let me tell you, that requires actual leadership skills to pull off successfully, because big groups of people where everyone was only lightly bound together with a shared purpose would commonly shatter when put under even moderate stress.

Like, I don't know, a venomous disagreement over who gets what loot.

Or, say, when your amazing tank-healer combo, who were in a relationship, decide that they don't want to be together anymore, and it creates a schism in the group that would make the Catholic church proud.

As raid leader, I did all sorts of things, like:

• Recruit for the raid group, critically evaluating candidates, running them through easier content to see how they performed and then helping to position them where they could provide the most benefit.
• Organise the raid nights, aligning a large group of people with different schedules so that they all turned up at the same time and were focused on a single task for the next few hours.
• Make tough decisions about who would benefit the most from any treasure that dropped, either strengthening weaker members of the group or emphasising those that were already strong, both of which required light risk analysis to determine the best path to take.
• Maintain morale in the face of defeat, a common occurrence at the bleeding edge of raiding where sometimes you would die over and over again, tens to hundreds of times, on a single boss before successfully killing them and moving on to the next challenge.
• Lead from the front most of the time, acting as the main tank for the group, controlling the ebb and flow of the raid itself, taking breaks where appropriate to maintain attention spans and performance.

It was all relevant to real world leadership, even though I didn't realise it at the time.

Bringing this rambling, only vaguely coherent, sequence of thoughts to a close I suppose what I'm trying to say is that you can get leadership experience in the weirdest of places, and that includes video games.

If you're thinking of progressing your career in a leadership direction, rather than just waiting until something comes up professionally, maybe try wrangling groups of people in a virtual environment.

I wouldn't recommend playing MMO's though.

Those things are monstrous time sinks and these days, are less about discovery and fun and shared experiences and more about maximising the total volume of money that can be extracted from the player base.

Which is a shame.