blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

The background of people in WoW (according to Joi) is more working class than SL.

In SL, 80% of the active population are creating things.

WoW is an gigantic investment of time (true), certain runs require a combination of hundreds of hours of individual work.

Joi’s “dashboard” is enormous. According to him, it’s more like flying with instruments and the actual 3D realm becomes more of a background to the statistics he’s watching. So some runs require up to 40 players of level 60 each to cooperate, with an intricate rank-system, different skills, etc., everyone linked over audio and Joi in command. (I see that this is generating a lot of fuss in business circles with Yahoo allegedly considering applicants’ experience in WoW, because it’s all about solving problems and coordination and especially leadership. But – much more obvious, this is the future of war. Commanding 40 soldiers from a computer with complete overview of the relevant contexts is practically identical to what for instance the US army likes to call the digital battlefield, applied and working.)

The integration of audio communication in the form of Teamspeak into the game (sometimes even as ambient sound while not playing) leads to a seamless experience and Joi saying that he doesn’t “distinguish between the entities [real and virtual] anymore”, dismissing Richard Barlow’s view of real-world audio as “immersion-busting, reality-intrusive, anti-roleplaying debasement”.

These games are almost completely social, with diversity between players only adding to the challenge of the original game’s narrative.

There’s lots of in-game rituals, some which have emerged from within the game, some from the outside (funerals for players who [really] died, etc.)

A huge body of Machinima-work exists already but most of it is still illegal, since – unlike in SL – players don’t own what they create, screenshots, etc.

Ultimately, it could/should become like SL with users generating more and more content (and owning it?) themselves. (Funny that SL much less often faces the same criticism as WoW does. It seems to be OK to spend my whole day in some kind of virtual world if you can make money there – interesting how differently relatively similar things can be justified only because there is an economic basis to it. SL gets you on the cover of The Economist, but the people making money could be just as addicted to it as the others raiding dungeons at the same time. Is it only the money that makes SL arguably feel more worthwhile from that perspective?)

There is some Gold Farming going on, often in China, but it’s more of a shadow economy. 50% of the players are Chinese, though. Interestingly, Blizzard is currently strongly opposed to making the in-game currency interchangable with actual currencies, but often Chinese players and companies don’t share this egalitarian perspective at all. They argue that it would only be right that richer people would have more power in the game as well.

Some of his screenshots.