World of Warcraft Presentation

It is saying to much about myself to admit that at midnight I'm sitting at my computer watching a :40 minute video of a presentation on World of Warcraft?  Well I am.  And it's fascinating. 

Joi Ito (blogger and Japanese entrepreneur extraordinaire) recently gave a talk at the Chaos Communications conference in Berlin on Worlds of Warcraft that is well worth watching. 

You can find it on Goggle video here.  I've never played WoW but am fascinated by the fact that 8 million people spend countless hours doing so.

Ito breaks down the game, how it's different from Second Life, the different types of players, how guilds function, the massive social diversity in the game, how UIs are being tweaked (and man is his custom UI something to behold), how these games teach project management and teamwork, how voice communication is used and not used, etc.  It's a great primer on the space.  The folks over at WeMakeMoneyNotArt were at the presentation and wrote up some good notes on it here. 

Sascha Pohflepp also writes about it in his blog.  Some examples of what Ito covers from Sascha:

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.

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”.

Another thing he shows in the presentation are "guild promos" - movies that his guild (and some others) have created to show themselves off and recruit members.  I've never been a huge fan of machinima; I think I prefer bad actors to avatars acting badly.  But these guild promos I love.  They are tributes to epic battles and hard-fought victories, honoring the guild members and what they stand for.  And in many ways they're the virtual equivalent of the sky-divers or skateboarders who tape their exploits and triumphs to edit into videos to share with friends.  You can spend hours looking through these on YouTube, of course.  Here's an example of a great promo from Liquid Dreams. 

Another thing Ito mentions are in-game rituals for out-of-game events.  The pic below is a screen-shot from a WoW funeral held for a Chinese player who died in real life.  I find it oddly moving.

(via BoingBoing)