In an online response to our recent essay “The Gamer Disposition” and its discussion of leadership in MMOGs, Joi Ito wondered whether playing games creates the gamer disposition (bottom line

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orientation, embracing diversity, thriving on change, seeing learning as fun, and marinating on the edge) or whether they simply tend to attract the kinds of people that already have that disposition.

The question Ito poses is the 21st century equivalent of the age old problem: Are leaders born or made? Or perhaps, in our context: Are gamers born or made.

Our research has focused on reframing that question slightly to situate it in the context of the challenges emerging in the 21st century workplace. For example, people who may never have the opportunity to be in leadership positions in the workplace may never know they enjoy the challenges leadership presents or that they are good at meeting them. Games present leadership opportunities on a nearly constant basis, allowing players to find a voice and develop talents as leaders in a wide variety of contexts. Whether the qualities that we identify as part of the gamer disposition are innate or not, we believe that these games are spaces which allow players to give voice to their abilities and in some cases even discover talents that may otherwise lie dormant had they not become a gamer.

By framing these issues as dispositions, rather than skills, we were trying to highlight something fundamentally different from the traditional model of teaching and training or learning as an issue of direct transfer. As some of our earlier publications have illustrated, games can teach skills. But that is not our point here. Conceptually, dispositions are about something quite different; they are at a higher level than skills.

Where some skills can be seen as transferring directly from the game world to the real world, dispositions are a little more difficult to pin down. Dispositions engage the player at the level of imagination. They are part of a broader conceptual outlook that transcends skill. Imagination is what allows players to see different possibilities in each problem space or challenge. Similarly, dispositions predispose a person to use different approaches for each set of circumstances they imagine. In that sense, dispositions are contingent upon the circumstances that allow or encourage them to be brought to the fore. In the context of games, we can discuss a broad range of skills that help a player to manage change, but it is the gamer disposition that allows them to embrace it.

We have been struck by our conversations with a guild leader who was hired in a management position at a major Internet company. He imagined building his team as if he were building a guild. Where most of us, savvy about such things, would demand a well specified set of resources before agreeing to be held accountable, that thought didn’t occur to him. Instead, he believed that part of solving the challenge/quest was finding the resources to accomplish the task. From his success in the game world he was confident that he could find skilled people and attract them to work on his quest no matter where they were in the corporation. Such attitudes, while disruptive in most corporations (jumping over silos and seducing folks to work on YOUR problem) are commonplace in games.

The dispositions that emerge from games can teach us a lot about what the workplace of the 21st century will need to look like if it is going to harness the power of people who know how to succeed in a world of rapid and constant change. But it is not a direct translation.

In other words, it makes no sense to run your business as a World of Warcraft guild, but it might make sense to imagine it as one.

To return to the question that animated this discussion, it seems less important to know how these dispositions emerge than to find ways to make sure that the organizations of today and tomorrow understand how to make the most of them.