Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison looked at a random sample of 2,000 chat room posts about "World of Warcraft" to see what the players were discussing. The research found the game encouraged scientific thinking.

i play wow alot and i think its gr8 it has def made me smrter

i c wut u did thar. lulz l2p nub. kkthx

roflmao

They're not just talking about hand-eye. Not in WoW at least. They're talking about the problem solving skills that give you an edge in this game. It's kinda funny too, in my old guild there were several doctors....I think one of them was in school to become a laparoscopic surgeon too!

Hmm, Wisconsin.

FIGURES

When IBM commissioned Seriosity to study leadership in games, Seriosity used a team of a half-dozen veteran players, with more than 50,000 hours of cumulative experience, to observe and record the actions of leaders in this rarefied setting. The eight-month study also included interviews with more than a dozen prominent gamers about their leadership endeavors in this arena. A follow-up survey at IBM of people with both gaming and business leadership experience helped validate some of our findings and suggested how they might be translated to fit real-world corporate contexts.

A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you’d never expect to identify—and who’d never expect to be identified—as “high potentials” for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games. Even more provocative was our finding that successful leadership in online games has less to do with the attributes of individual leaders than with the game environment, as created by the developer and enhanced by the gamers themselves. Furthermore, some characteristics of that environment—for example, immediate compensation for successful completion of a project with nonmonetary incentives, such as points for commitment and game performance—represent more than mere foreshadowing of how leadership might evolve.

I do actually know a guy who got completely addicted to a MMORPG. Like seriously badly.

Basically when he went into his room he was a normal maths student, doing well in his studies, with a girlfriend, a job, a fairly healthy body, and a kid. He emerged a month later. He was undernourished, looked like sunlight might kill him, had lost his girlfriend and his job, been kicked out of uni, hadn't seen his kid in weeks and his housemates had long assumed he'd gone back home.

He now works as a manager in a supermarket. Winners don't play MMOs.

Oh don't get me wrong I'm not saying he's the norm. Quite the opposite. He's a scary extreme.

That's nearly a year of your life you've spent playing a video game, loser Josh. I only keed!