From ‘Training Grounds’ to Sociotechnical Actors: Do MMORPGs Presage the Futures of Work?

This conceptual paper, presented as an extended abstract at DiGRA 2018, challenges the prevailing view that massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) serve as "training grounds" for leadership skills that transfer to organizational settings. Its central thesis reverses this relationship: rather than merely mirroring or preparing people for workplace leadership, games such as World of Warcraft are argued to be sociotechnical systems that actively participate in shaping 21st-century leadership models and forms of work. The authors frame their inquiry around whether MMORPGs prestage emerging cultural and organizational forms, and whether games exert agency over new modes of knowledge creation and affective labour in globalized economies.

The paper situates its argument within a broader shift from command-and-control leadership toward distributed, networked, and heterarchical models that emphasize self-organizing teams, shared responsibility, and leadership exercised "from the middle." It notes that much existing research on game-based leadership training remains theoretically thin, relying on traditional managerial trait theory and fixed notions of interpersonal skill. The authors observe that even purpose-built business simulations have been criticized for failing to articulate or embody coherent leadership theories, while MMORPGs have long modelled the team-based, transient, and boundary-blurring structures now associated with contemporary organizations.

Methodologically, the paper is conceptual rather than empirical. It offers no survey data, sample, or original analysis; its contribution lies in theoretical reframing, drawing on actor-network theory and critical readings of neoliberal work. The scope is therefore interpretive, centred on World of Warcraft as a paradigmatic case and on the relationship between virtual game worlds and emerging organizational forms, rather than on measured outcomes across populations or time periods.