Games Teaching People Skills

There is a stereotype that gamers are poor communicators.  I am sure that it is easy to find examples of this, though in my own person experience of development communities my peers are very chatty! What I think is one of the things that challenges this stereotype is MMOs – these are games that require you to form groups to success and to work in a group takes people skills. I did a TEDx talk where I suggested that future political leaders might learn these people skills in the cut-and-thrust of World of Warcraft (excuse the pun!) as likely as they would from student or local politics. And to back this assertion comes an AMA on Reddit about EVE Online… This is from the intro to the Ask Me Anything (AMA):

I used to run the largest alliance in Eve Online – AMA …  I started out as a complete noobie, and within a few months was helping to train other noobies, and then became a diplomat and worked up the ranks from there. … The best way to describe running an Eve alliance is like being a CEO of a major multinational company, except nobody gets paid but a shit ton of work still has to get done.

On the subject of EVE Online – there has been a huge series of battles for control within the game recently that are on a space-opera scale: