Gamers investing countless hours on MMORPGs may have something to smile about: a study by IBM and Seriosity reveals that online games actually help shape up managers and corporate leaders.

"What we've found is that success as a business leader may depend on skills as a gamer. Smart organizations are recognizing valued employees who play online games and apply their skills and experiences as virtual leaders to their 'real world' jobs," said Jim Spohrer, Director of Services Research, IBM Research Center in Almaden, Calif.

Online games and the future of work are found to have various similarities in terms of required skills and challenges tackled. According to the report: today's gamers are learning collaboration, self-organization, risk-taking, openness, influence, and how to earn incentives linked to performance and be flexible in the way they communicate.

Here are the features of game environments that businesses should adopt:

• Incentive structures that motivate workers immediately and longer term
• Virtual economies that create a marketplace for information and collaboration
• Transparency of performance and capabilities
• Recognition for achievements
• Visibility into networks of communication across an organization

With game design concepts used in educating children and MMORPG players given the spotlight as the future's world leaders, it looks like everything is shaping up to put the virtual worlds we gamers enjoy beside the real challenges of life. Happy gaming!

  

Dan Miller is one cool dude. Read on, and find out why.

Business journalist H.S. Ayoub recently submitted to Internet Stock blog SeekingAlpha a write-up on his experiences in Linden Lab's Second Life. Obviously the fellow focused more on the business aspects of the metaverse. He covered the recent activities of Cisco Systems, IBM, American Apparel, and Toyota within the virtual world.

What's noteworthy though about his report is his input on government – to be specific, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress - plans to start taxing transactions taking place within Second Life.  Ayoub takes time to note Dan Miller's view on the subject. Ayoub writes:

While the flurry of activity and monetary spending can attract the attention of businesses, it can also attract the government. The Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress is taking a hard look at the possibility of taxing income derived from virtual online worlds. But the general consensus is against any taxation at this time. The blogging community immediately condemned the committee's announcement last year, and Dan Miller, senior economist on the committee, agrees.

He believes that a realistic attempt at taxing virtual transactions could prove very difficult. It would place too much pressure on virtual administrators, such as Linden Lab, to keep tabs on the millions of transactions and player activities that occur every day. This, Miller believes, could slow down the impressive innovation taking place. It is not surprising to learn that the 64 year-old Miller is an avid World of Warcraft fan, and player!

Great, the great online businesses on Second Life, indirectly defended from taxation by a World of Warcraft player. The amazing teh internetz is. Amazing.

Multinational computer technology corporation IBM currently has a prototype software that will give birth to future speech-to-speech translation engines. Dubbed as MASTOR, Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Technology aims to provide users speech translations in  real time.

Here's how the software works: With the help of MASTOR, the words spoken in a foreign language by someone on one end of the receiver will be translated into English so that the person on the other end will be able to understand him, and vice versa. IBM Innovation and Technology Executive VP Nicholas Donofrio explains,

We have been working on speech technology for nearly 35 years now. As opposed to our earlier efforts where we were solely focused on perfect translation, this time around we focused on its use in other parlance where perfection does not matter. A technology was born that can offer translation service in real time.

MASTOR was actually tested with the armed forces during the Iraq war. And we guess you are still wondering what the heck this article has to do with MMO games. Donoforio further mentioned,

The technology has uses in massively multiplayer online games. Imagine you are playing World of Warcraft with players from different countries. How can you converse in a common language? Well with MASTOR, you could be playing from Korea, China or Italy, all at the same time and everybody could understand each other.

Like we've mentioned at the beginning of this article, MASTOR is still a prototype software so don't expect a commercial version any time soon. It's just good to know that an innovation like this will soon be heading our way. IBM also plans to use MASTOR in medical facilities, law enforcement, banking, and travel.