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6 Real-Time Collaboration Lessons From Multiplayer Game Guilds (Not Heard at SXSW)

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In at least three talks that I attended at SXSW conference in Austin recently resurfaced the idea of guilds in history or in multiplayer games as a multi-stakeholder network approach to collaborate real-time. These were not speakers from startups focused on building the next competitor to World of Warcraft, or Call of Duty; nor were they newly minted stars on the topic of gamification.

Rather, they were sessions with eminent business management thought leaders: John Hagel, Chairman of Deloitte Center for the Edge, JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com, and Professor Thomas Malone, Director of the MIT Sloan School of Management Center for Collective Intelligence. All three sessions raised the significance of reintroducing guilds into organizations. Yet, I question the broader practicality of the multiplayer game guild model, based on my past experience in being in them, running them, and writing about them.

I should clarify (as Mr. Rangaswami did during his talk) this is not an article about gamification, or about serious games, two other concepts currently circulating in social business circles. Instead, it is a look at leadership practices that encourage collaboration, and build the new skills to keep on top of business today. Some would call these community management techniques since a guild in a way is also a community. My focus here is more on the particular pre-conditions and sequence of how collaboration occurs in real-time in games.

Mr. Hagel per his book along with John Seely-Brown, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books, 2010), frequently speaks on how our investment in fixed knowledge or knowledge stocks is a loosing proposition because, in this day and age, knowledge depreciates rapidly in value. The emphasis is to find ways to manage flows of knowledge and preferably in real-time. He  pointed towards the concept of guilds in World of Warcraft as a possible worthy instrument to handle knowledge flows. It is a catchy idea but I have to ask what that means?

JP Rangaswami unfortunately only had a short time slot to speak on “Multiplayer Work: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” at SXSW. His session description stated: “...As processes get replaced by patterns, as exceptions become the rule, there is a lot to be learnt from MMORPG in terms of priorities, motivation, teamwork and outcomes.” (MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.) His talk focused more heavily on why we should consider new work models as we transition from product-intensive to service-intensive work: “The truth is as we enter the service world, we are no longer able to do so many parts per thousand. … Service work is lumpy; it occurs in lumps of time.”

The nature of service work means that we spend our time unevenly, intensively productive in some, but not so during others. However, to try to keep the uniform rate of the assembly line norm for product-work we try to fill up the unproductive time with other vaguely productive things. Per Mr. Rangaswami, “We call these meetings.”

He added that service work needs people to choose team members at a peer level rather than assignment by hierarchy. This non-linearity of time and network constituency is already there in game environments. He then referred to gamification elements of scoring systems, activity streams and sharing intentions. There is a seed idea there but it is not quite enough to explain why game guilds methods are significant.

The final SXSW session that touched briefly on guilds was “Decentralized Organizations: Do they work?” featuring Prof. Malone, Philip Rosedale (founder of LindenLabs known for the 3D virtual world, SecondLife), Zach Ware of Zappos, Kat Steinmetz from Burning Man, and James Taylor of Amgen. Here Prof Malone was referring to guilds as they existed in medieval times as a means to encourage peer learning, apprentice-mentorship relationships, and bounds to a code of conduct.

Unfortunately, I still cannot find a good explanation the applicability of the modern concept of multiplayer guilds as a new construct for coordinating work. There have been other thought leaders who have spoken on rediscovering the value of guilds.

In my book I wrote how Joi Ito (tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and Director of MIT Media Lab) spoke at Web 2.0 Summit back in 2006 on how guilds in Warcraft allow multiple players to work together creating a flowing symphony of achievement, with the guild leaders or guildmaster acting as conductors. At the Dachis Social Business Summit 2010, I heard and spoke to Douglas Rushkoff (author, speaker and lecturer at NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, The New School and the Esalen Institute) also describe investing in developing quality over quantity and the value of apprentice-mentor relationships.

There is something to this idea of reconsidering guilds in relationship to organizational structure and work. But what is it exactly?

Guilds generally build a network of people who are committed to some overall goals, and when needed for specific projects or quests, enlist members into the specific activities.

The core, I believe, is this idea of interesting multiple people towards becoming stakeholders in a common vision, without giving strict directions but allowing the group to guide each other towards the goal in real-time. In addition, it is also to teach in real-time through observable work and developing an instinct for quality for performance, without any actual training.

How does it work in real-time?

Real-time action in guilds is most observable when they engage in quests together. The guild may put out a call to action to its members, identify the quest, and perhaps have a meeting on who will participate in what roles. The reality is that the quest may be carried out at a different time, and not everyone who signed up may actually participate. The guild leaders have to decide on how to reshuffle people into the needed roles. During the quest, which may be a number of separate tasks, the guild leader(s) call on specific capabilities—they may or may not refer to the specific player(s) by name because the focus is on the capability—and the responsible player jumps into action.

Success here really depends on several getting these 6 things right:

  1. The guild master or guild leaders must know how to carry out the mission – Quest objectives in games requiring action as a guild are often known in advance. E.g., they may know the strength of the enemy with some variability, or the many steps involved
  2. They need to plan ahead on the capabilities they think they will need to solve it
  3. They need to know their players, both if they have the needed capabilities, and trust to carry them out in the heat of the moment
  4. They need to communicate effectively and quickly in the middle of the action.
  5. They need real-time data of multiple factors (the environment, the situation, the opponents, their players)  in the middle of action
  6. They need to prepare with the right tools – in games, it can be macros to execute a number of steps in rapid succession, or a good user interface to examine the data in real-time.

Any military commander will tell you that this is not all that different from they expect of their servicemen and servicewomen, but they will also tell you that there is a lot of set up that needs to exist to set this all in motion. That itself is a book’s worth of knowledge but here’s the short of it from my prior experience in 7 other lessons:

  1. Create a differentiating group identity
  2. Build a code of conduct, require participation
  3. Enlist influencers who work, not talk
  4. Actively build relationships of members
  5. Don’t assign tasks; define needed roles and allow people to self-elect
  6. Learn by Watching, not by Training
  7. Share the rewards

There are also other factors that make multiplayer game guilds not suitable methods to apply to the work environment (even after you exclude their entertainment nature), but that is a tale for another time…

[Back in the early 1990s I heavily invested time in MMORPGs, and eventually wrote two key books on the subject: Playing MUDs on the Internet, and Playing Wargames on the Internet (John Wiley & Sons, 1995-96). It went on later through other games, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Halo, etc.  If you can find a copy of the books, it might be interesting to see how people are rediscovering many of the same lessons over 15 years later. Ping me on Twitter: @rawn]