A study of leadership roles in massively-multiplayer online games such as World of Warctaft

What is it about?

The articles uses the concept "structural role" to analyze the important function that guild leaders and raid leaders play in massively-multiplayer online games. The term "structural roles" emphasizes individuals who have greater-than-average responsibility for managing collaborative behaviors among groups in online communities. After hundreds of hours of participant observation in leadership roles and analysis of the experiences and knowledge of other guild and raid leaders, we found that there were at least things that enabled leaders to be successful: (1) an interest or willingness to learn the intricacies of gameplay, (2) taking responsibility for players’ emotional well-being, and (3) managing other players' behaviors. Our data come from research in World of Warctaft, but our conceptualization of structural roles is relevant to other key roles in digitally-mediated environments.

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Why is it important?

As more people spend increasing amounts of time collaborating with other people online, we need to understand the responsibilities that leaders in online environments have. More to the point, the term "role" is used often (for example in role-playing game), yet few scholars have unpacked that term and considered its various meanings. We found that leaders' roles are embodied in at least three analytic forms: cognitive (which has to do with the knowledge they master), emotional (which has to do with their ability to connect emotionally with other players), and behavioral (which has to do with their ability to manage their own and others' behaviors). Recognizing these dimensions should help future scholars to make sense of their own studies on individuals who perform structural roles.

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