More catching up, slowly

[zhai]

So. Steve (the greenbottle fly, if you remember him) continues to persist. I think he's even gotten most of the coffee off of his body.

Brief update, mostly for a couple of links. WoW friends will appreciate this, courtesy wired_blogs: "From MMO to CEO", a rather belated article covering the transfer of leadership skills learned in online game

Comments

[zhai]

Absolutely agreed. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the Onyxia thing -- you have to admit it sounds better.

I think the key with this sort of thing (from my approach with concession to this being a pet hypothesis) is in an instructional and confidence-building area... people generally do come in with these skills, they just lack the on-the-job developed confidence to know that they have them. So being able to think of these in terms of transference, that confidence in leading a guild can be confidence in applying those specific skills (recruiting, conflict mediation, goal structures) in the real world.

Re telepresence, what's interesting is that I'm noticing what seems to be an increasing spread in the electronic communication abilities of various people. Because more and more people are starting to interact online, some of them are becoming better at it, and are developing higher standards for online communication -- emails, written communication. Interacting with another person who is perfectly intelligent but for whatever reason has poor email communication skills can cause conflicts because people with the higher standard for email communication will judge their intelligence according to their emails, which isn't always accurate or productive. It's interesting to see this happening where before the online communication methods were still new enough that people who used them regularly were in the minority, so everyone was more or less bad at it.