Metaphors for Management

This is the first part of two parts of a lengthy blog I'm writing to reflect on the parallels between business management and running a guild in an online game; specifically World of Warcraft.

I won't get into the details of the psychological revelations I came to from being addicted to that game for over 4 years, but I actually gained something useful in real life from my experience with online gaming.

For a period of about a year, I ran a raiding guild. For those unfamiliar with the concept of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMO's as they are referred to often by gamers), let me explain what that meant. A guild is a collection of real life players who have a specialized chat function in game, frequently aid each other in in-game tasks, and ultimately team up in groups as large as 40 players at the same time, using VOIP and attempting to achieve certain objectives. Most commonly "raiding" against difficult enemies, requiring tactics, gear, and augmenting potions and what not. Some of you may be beginning to see how this could parallel a management position. If you don't see it yet, bare with me.

When I first proposed the idea to a few of my real life friends, we got very excited about the possibility of putting our expertise about the game into a new guild. We tossed around a few name ideas, and ultimately landed on "Born of Ashes", a reference to the Phoenix; a bird which at the end of it's life incinerates itself only to be reborn from the ashes of itself. We chose this metaphor because many of my real life friends were the remnants of other great guilds which had either fallen apart, or had become estranged for some reason. Getting the guild up was fairly easy, but it would increase in its complexity of management as it expanded.

Once established, we needed players. With raids having a minimum size of 10 players and a maximum of 40, the 4-5 players we had in the guild couldn't run anything by ourselves, not to mention getting everyone online at one time. For about a month we posted messages in general chat looking for warm bodies to fill raid slots. Then we caught a break. One of the random players we had recruited was friends with a somewhat large guild which was falling apart, and we managed to merge with them, infusing about 20 players to bolster our raid strength. Over the course of the guilds existence we did some light recruiting, but with the merger we had little need to grow more.

As the guild grew, it was clear I couldn't run everything by myself and a management structure had to be set up. The structure that emerged ended up being me and my closest friend at the time as the oligarchs with ultimate say in where the direction of the guild went. Below that we had class leaders, one for each class (there were 9 classes). These were our "upper management". They would keep me informed about problems, recruitment, and advise me on their take on the guilds activities and direction. These class leaders were players who had proven themselves to be talented players, but more importantly showed devotion to the guild and its success. Underneath those the two ranks were "raiders", rank and file players who were talented and showed up regularly, and then a rank for initiates or players who chose to be in Born of Ashes for a more social experience.

The next issue we had was scheduling. We set up a forum based site that players could register on so we could assign players to raid times and days. The biggest issue of scheduling was getting the exact right amount of players on and the right mix of classes when we needed them. If we overbooked a raid, many players wouldn't get in, or would have to start their own independent raid, or hope that someone would drop from an existing raid. Any of those options was rarely ideal for the players, and I knew it was undesirable. If we under booked a raid, or had a bunch of players not available, the raid couldn't go till we got enough guild members online, or we filled it out with Pick-up group members (PUGs). Eventually we sifted through some of the superfluous players and got a core group of players who would consistently show up, or at least give ample warning they wouldn't make it. Managing attendance became more an act of motivating people to come to raids since we didn't subscribe to a philosophy of "Wow > Life"

While the "back office" duties were crucial to our success, the most fun part for me was leading raids. Real time interaction with large groups of real players facing ever more difficult challenges became a source of great enjoyment for me. Having been in many guilds before mine, I tried to come up with a customized management strategy that was a compilation of the best traits I had seen, and devoid of the worst. Many of my best traits I adapted from a real life friend of my brothers, whose screen name was Artulean, or R2 for short. He would keep a calm demeanor, and make sure that everyone was clear on their roles for the fights. Unfortunately, like many raid leaders (him less so than others), when things went wrong he would often play the blame game, saying things over VOIP like "Healers, what the fuck was that?". It was my experience that comments like that were obnoxious, unhelpful and detrimental to group morale. As such I used a variety of observational techniques to gather useful information, and dispense helpful, constructive, and optimistic feedback on refining our techniques for encounters. The tools at my disposal were a series of mods for the game which could tell me players movements, actions, damage output and so on. I also relied on the feedback of my class leaders to apprise me of shortcomings among individual classes.

My job was to make sure that the raid worked in perfect symphony so that the healers, tanks and damage dealers were not just fighting on their own, but doing what was necessary to achieve success for the entire raid. Beyond providing positive criticism and feedback, I made sure to acknowledge individual players over VOIP for exceptional performance and improvement from previous attempts. I also made a note of not praising or criticizing the same person over and over, so that each player got attention from me personally at one point or another (If someone truly deserved praise or criticism however, I gave it, with minimal regard for frequency). Most of the time I tried to focus on groups of players rather than individuals. For example, if on a fight the Damage Per Second (DPS) was lacking in a certain area, I would calmly gather any information players had regarding the failure, and then address the problem as a whole, instead of fixing specific symptoms of the larger fault.

This proved a successful technique and we began to quickly progress through to harder content, but as the content became more difficult, so too did my job of managing it. We got to the point where specific "consumables" (Items to buff stats and combat abilities) were essential for encounters, but with a relaxed raiding attitude, we didn't want to force people to spend their free time collecting the materials for such items. So as a result, the duty fell to the officers and class leaders, with mild resentment. More complications to my duties arose, and eventually I was spending about three hours preparing for every 4 hours raid. Trying to balance the guild, my personal life, and my scholastic efforts was becoming impossible. About 9-10 months after starting the guild, I passed off leadership of the guild to one of my close friends, and demoted myself to more of a consultant rank, and I would raid when I had the time.

Once I stepped down as the guild leader, the cohesion began to splinter a bit. Core raiders had to adapt to different leadership styles, different scheduling, and some simply quit. While it would be presumptuous to say that I was the only thing holding the guild together, I do believe that my stepping down, began to unravel things. Had I have worked to instill my leadership values in my officers and class leaders, perhaps they could have carried over the culture on their own. Were it a real business situation, it's unlikely that I would have essentially abandoned the group without planning my succession, but at the time, it was an issue of balancing a game versus real life issues like grades and friends.

Ultimately over the course of the coming months, the guild dissolved with only a few remaining alternate characters in the guild to congregate under the flag on the empire we knew so intimately. Many of the players I led and raided with became real life friends of mine.

That's basically the course of the guild, and what happened. I'm going to post a follow up to this specifically pertaining to the business management. This was one of the longest lasting leadership positions I held, and I dealt with the most complexity and subordinates. While the stakes were almost non existent, I certainly took pride in what I did, and performed to the best of my abilities, and I feel I have gained a great deal of real life experience from the duties I performed for the video game.