World of Warcraft Is More Than a Time Sink, If You Can Believe It

There have been periods in all our lives where we got way too involved in something. Ever woke up in the middle of the night to check on your Tamagotchi? Or found yourself with just waaaaay too many collectible glass cats? For a lot of people, that obsession was World of Warcraft.

For those of you who don’t know (and considering it just had a major movie and has been parodied by South Park, it might not be that many of you anymore), in World of Warcraft you create a fantasy character and go on virtual quests in the fantasy world of Azeroth, often with other players. People have fought in groups as large as 40 to raid the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj, assaulted the Lich King’s citadel and spent countless hours picking herbs and punching monsters for gold.

“WoW,” as it’s known, has lasted for 12 years now because it keeps adding new content to bring in new players and keep old ones interested. The latest expansion will drop next week, which might cause a few of your coworkers (👋) to temporarily go missing.

But the game offers much more than just virtual gold — you might even learn a thing or two to help your career.

Like the following:

Networking

WoW is the most successful game in the massively multiplayer online role playing genre (a genre in which people all over the world can interact in a shared space), and raids can only be done with multiple players working together towards a common goal. The hardest raids require 25 people to work together to take down a huge monster. Players group together in guilds, which allows them to collaborate to do what no one player could do alone.

And of course, you never know when your raiding buddy might offer you an IRL job.

Leadership Skills

I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase “herding cats.” Trying to tell a bunch of random players not to stand in fire is very much that.

It takes a ton of leadership skills to coordinate dozens of WoW players with real lives in multiple time zones to sit down for several hours to play together. Then there’s creating study guides, allocating resource gathering and making sure everyone does their part in fights. It’s easy to want to chew another player out for making a mistake that causes everyone to die, but good leaders know how to help their team, not put them down.

Guilds can be huge, well-oiled machines that include a number of managers to handle the workload. Don’t laugh; guild leadership is a legitimate job.

Goal Setting

There’s a ton of things to do in WoW, from collecting pets to getting the first raid clear on your server. Without a clear goal in mind, you might just wander and feel like you’re wasting your time. Some people are okay with that, but the sense of accomplishment of finally getting your [Grove Warden] can’t be beat.

Life, both real and virtual, is made worthwhile by reaching your goals. So what if mine was getting a flying moose?

Organization

So you know what you want to do — great! But do you know how to get there? You’ll have to prepare by getting the right gear or running the same dungeon in hopes of a rare drop.

Organizing allows you to tackle your goals in the most efficient ways possible. As a WoW player, you know you’re in deep once you start using spreadsheets. But every office job requires you to use them, so you might as well learn to use all those fancy features while you’re playing!

It Takes All Types

You know the kind of things you like to do and what you’re good at, and that’s great! But you can’t do everything alone. Similarly, in WoW, every class has its own strengths and weaknesses; warlocks can summon team members, shamans can cast blood lust and druids can cover all the bases.

Any team, in an office or in a WoW raid, will have people from all backgrounds, viewpoints and skills. You never know where the next great idea might come from!

Follow On Vocation by AptoZen or the AptoZen blog for more fun career-oriented content.