Things I learned from WoW

Sydney has a cool list over on WoW Ladies LJ, about what she learned from videogames, and most of the items sound specifically like they're from World of Warcraft. Diplomacy and Leadership are probably pretty obvious, and we've already heard that some companies are seeing a stint as a GL in WoW as a bonus to the resume. But Sydney also learned the value of a savings account (because saving up for an epic mount might be the biggest amount of saving some players have done), math and economics from WoW. There's no question that the math can get pretty complicated, and if you can wrap your head around how much agility you need to break 25% on your Dodge, you're definitely on top of algebra, if not a little bit of calculus.

But the two items I was most surprised by were that Sydney says she learned vocabulary and problem-solving from videogames. I don't doubt at all that they're true, but learning vocabulary is not something that's normally expected from playing games, either online or offline. Still, words like "mitigate" (her example) are used all the time when theorycrafting, and while there are a lot of jargon words floating around (you'll probably never use "tanking" in a real life conversation), just using that vocabulary can help. And problem-solving is obvious, not just in WoW, but in all videogames-- you could argue that all videogaming is simply being presented with a problem for the player to solve.

I'm not saying that we should all play WoW all the time instead of going to school (sorry kids). But when people with self-control and a good center play videogames (as opposed to people who don't), all kinds of good can happen.