I’ve always been an avid gamer, with the singular exclusion of console shooters because PCs do it better. Of the games I’ve played World of Warcraft has eaten the most amount of time but I’ve learned a lot from it.
I’ve learned that I’m a fairly effective manager. I’ve also learned that I don’t like manage. I prefer to focus on my job and know that at the end of the day, regardless of the success of the organization I’m in, I did my job as best I could. When forced to manage my sense of accomplishment isn’t so neatly tied to my personal performance but the performance of others. When other people have a bad day, as everyone does, it’s difficult for me to not feel like I could have performed better, even when it’s totally out of my control.
I’ve also learned a truism of economics. Supply and demand and basically meaningless. People will pay as much as they feel something is worth. The cheaper, the more people will pay, but the lower your profit is. Thus the goal of any successful money making undertaking is to find the point where you can optimize your total profit by finding where customer base * profit per customer is the highest.
Ironically, I’ve learned very little about typical game stuff from WoW. Things like reflexes, spacial reasoning, etc are better harnessed in other games but the things WoW teaches are fairly unique to MMOs.