People Before Pixels: How Guild Leadership in World of Warcraft Speaks to Educational Leadership
Moses Wolfenstein
Wed., June 09, 2:00–3:00, Beefeater
The first wave of virtual worlds research brought to light the power of MMOs and the communities around them as spaces for informal learning (Steinkuehler, 2006), and highlighted the potential opportunities for leadership development in these online spaces (Brown & Thomas, 2006; Yee, 2006; Reeves & Malone, 2007). This research into guild leadership in World of Warcraft (WoW) works to expand on these foundational efforts by asking what guild leadership practices look like when examined using a common analytic framework from the field of organizational theory (Bolman & Deal, 2003), and how the study of virtual leadership can inform school leadership research and practice.
In this session, a description of leadership in WoW as explained through the words of the guild masters and raid leaders interviewed is presented. While claims of near transfer in leadership practice between guilds and schools may be difficult to substantiate, conversations with guild leaders make it evident that leadership in an online game can speak to education leadership in ways that are both powerful and familiar. At the same time, the theoretical tools of organizational leadership provide novel perspectives on the study of the communities of practice surrounding games and other digital media.
This work has utilized a distributed lens (Hutchins, 1994; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004) to analyze the practices of raiding guild leaders. Through a close examination of the tasks of guild leadership, it is evident that leadership in these organizations is broadly distributed with players, software & hardware, and nested cultures weaving an intricate tapestry of practice. At the same time, almost all of the leaders in this study spoke of adopting an authoritarian model of leadership, particularly when talking about guild policy and real time decision-making. Discussion of the findings will include how the presence of these seemingly contradictory trends can be reconciled within a fundamentally playful (Malaby, 2009) environment like World of Warcraft.
References
Bolman, L.G. & Deal, T.E. (2003) Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. San Francisco, CA.: Jossey-Bass.
Brown, J.S. & Thomas, D. (2006) You play World of Warcraft, you're hired! Wired 14(04)
Hutchins, E. (1994). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Malaby, T. (2009) Anthropology and play: The contours of playful experience. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1315542
Reeves and Malone (2007). Leadership in games and at work: Implications for the enterprise of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Report Prepared for IBM.
Spillane, J.P., Halverson, R. & Diamond, J. (2004) Towards a theory of school leadership practice: Implications of a distributed perspective. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(1): 3-34.
Steinkuehler, C.A. (2006). Virtual worlds, learning, & the new pop cosmopolitanism. Teachers College Record, 12843.
Yee, N. (2005) The Daedalus Gateway. http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus.