Strategic thinking in virtual worlds: Studying World of Warcraft

•We investigate development of strategic thinking in MMORPGs.•We develop a mechanism of the process of strategic thinking.•We demonstrate our findings in the form of six hermeneutic themes.•We provide insights regarding the social nature of strategic thinking. This paper reports our research on strategic thinking in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Specifically, we studied the World of Warcraft. Our overall goals were to expand our understanding of MMORPGs and their potential contributions to organizations, especially to the area of strategic information systems. We adopted an ethnographic approach to study how players develop strategic thinking. The results of the study are presented in two ways: a mechanism that has as its main focus in strategic thinking; and six hermeneutic themes. The hermeneutic themes include: (1) gradual immersion, (2) strategies as consequences of actions, (3) internalization of beliefs and strategies, (4) partial interpretation, (5) strategic thinking after the fact and (6) social aspects of strategy. We found that often players act with a partial interpretation of a problem; which is a preliminary and incomplete understanding of the task at hand. Depending on the degree of partial interpretations, players either follow other players or are able to articulate a sequence of actions called telescoping. Our findings provide insights regarding the social nature of strategic thinking in MMORPGs and the implications this may have for organizations, especially strategic information systems planning and thinking.