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15 Minutes of Fame: Joi Ito on player relationships and connecting
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Last week, we set the stage with internet superman Joichi Ito in a conversation that meandered through the old days of gaming, from getting his feet wet in MUDs to why he misses 40-man raiding in WoW. This week, we're back to discuss why some people with MBAs make crappy raid leaders, how WoW builds stronger bonds between people who work together, and his plans to bring WoW along for the ride at the MIT Media Lab. Catch up on last week's part 1 of our interview with Joi first. 15 Minutes of Fame: So what's your own guild focused on now? Joi Ito: The Horde side had kind of wound down a little bit. It still exists, but it's mostly the Alliance side now. When we were both going strong, it was really fun because we did a lot of joint stuff. [laughs] What we would do is do sort of sister guild PVP -- but it would always get messy because you'd find people from other guilds noticing and then jumping in. Right now, we're definitely not first in the realm, but we just hit level 25. I'm pretty delinquent; I need to level myself up, so as not to embarrass everyone too badly. [laughs] Every expansion, we go through several iterations of discussing the governance and stuff like that, and a lot of the old-time guild leadership aren't active. I got grandfathered in because it's hard not to have someone in the background, I guess, being the custodian of things to do when no one else can decide. There was a really interesting paper written by Dmitri Williams, who's an academic, and they did a study on the relationship between guild rules and stability of the guild. It said that in guilds that called themselves "casual" but didn't have any rules, the players tended to have more anxiety than those guilds where there were rules, and that "casual" didn't mean no rules, that rules help people feel comfortable. Our guild rules are pretty anal, a pretty extensive set of rules, and there's a lot of participation by the guild members in working on these rules. I don't know how formal rules are in other guilds -- I haven't been in too many other guilds -- but discussing the rules and the governance of the guild seems to be a thing that a lot of our guild likes to spend time on. That's primarily where my focus is these days, making sure that the leadership and the guild rules aren't too out of sync with what's going on in the game.
15 Minutes of Fame: MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito on WoW
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Let's get Joichi Ito's professional credentials out of the way first. The 44-year-old Japanese venture capitalist is the incoming director of the avant-garde MIT Media Laboratory. A self-professed "informal learner" (he dropped out of college twice and never finished a degree) now shines as one of the stars of the digital age, serving on the board of directors for Creative Commons, Technorati, ICANN, and Mozilla, and catching the wave as an early-bird investor in Last.fm, Flickr, and Twitter. Currently a resident of Dubai (he moved there so he could get a better feel for the people and the region), he circumnavigates the globe a full two times every month in the course of his international pursuits. According to his Twitter stream, he's been scuba diving in Japan this week taking underwater radioactivity samples; after catching the bug to learn how to dive, he promptly became a master diver and now is a PADI open water instructor. He's the godson of psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary ... ... and a guild leader in World of Warcraft. "My feeling is that what we are doing in WoW represents in many ways the future of real time collaborative teams and leadership in an increasingly ad hoc, always-on, diversity intense and real-time environment," he wrote in his blog back in 2006. In fact, one of his presentations on WoW made it into an early incarnation of our Moviewatch feature in 2007. So yeah, we're going to talk about WoW ... Need anything else to cement his gaming cred? Two more tidbits: Ito's GMed a WoW raiding guild since the original days of Molten Core, and he owns an actual handwritten map drawn by Richard Bartle, creator of the first MUD -- it's like the Magna Carta of gaming.
Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player
var digg_url = 'http://wow.joystiq.com/2008/11/20/obamas-fcc-transition-co-chair-is-a-wow-player/'; I've had a political dream for a while now that I think all of us WoW players can agree on: someday, I hope, we will have a President in the White House that plays videogames. We're not quite there yet, but we're closer -- apparently, Obama's FCC transition co-chair is a WoW player, and has played in two different endgame guilds, including Joi Ito's famous We Know guild. This is a guy who knows all about the communities that these MMOs create, and just how awesome it is to run through Karazhan, or grind PvP for a Merciless Gladiator weapon... and he's been selected by the incoming President of the United States to run the FCC. That's beautiful.Too many government officials (both Democrat and Republican, this isn't partisan at all) suffer from the "series of tubes" mentality -- they are being asked to regulate and coordinate things that they don't understand at all. But getting guys like Kevin Werbach in there, no matter what your political affiliation, is a great step forward for all of us gamers -- we'll have people behind the regulatory wheel who know how important and wonderful virtual worlds like Azeroth can be.Waltermonkey on Livejournal actually uncovered the guy's Armory profile (and has some great insight), and yes, though I'm sure some of the comments below will be about how you'd never be able to run a transition team AND get to level 80 at the same time, Werbach's been playing recently -- while he's still only level 70, he's actually got the Jenkins title. We've got a Resto Shaman helping run the FCC -- how awesome is that?
Hello Kitty FOR THE HORDE!
Actually, the Hello Kitty UI interface is faction-agnostic. And I'm not sure how HK would voice her allegiance anyway -- she has no mouth and she must scream. Regardless, Alice over at Wonderland links to two separate instances of a Hello Kitty-themed interface for WoW, one of them from famed virtual worlder Joi Ito. As she says, "Bloody hell ... it's horrible :o)"If Blizzard released an epic set of Hello Kitty armor tomorrow, how many of you would jump at it?
Revenge of the Joi of Warcraft
Serial entrepreneur and unofficial World of Warcraft spokesman Joi Ito recently sat down in the studio of Mobuzz.tv for an interview, which you can check out on their site. He touches on many of the most interesting aspects of the game (IMHO) including leadership and guild management, trust and bonding, achievement and value, and the implications of interface design when the current cadre of young players enters the business world and expects great tools to help coordinate personnel in that ever-elusive "real world." As one who sees a lot of parallels between my experiences in game and my "day job" experiences in the virtual office at Weblogs, Inc., I appreciate the way Joi communicates how World of Warcraft can provide inspiration for future leaders in the future office, as well as discussing the value that different and historically undervalued leadership qualities can bring to group coordination and management -- whilst simultaneously conveying the satisfaction and fun of pwning face.
WoW Moviewatch: Joi Ito talks WoW
This is probably the longest movie we've ever posted, at over 43 minutes. Entrepreneur, internet celebrity and generally hoopy frood Joi Ito (of We Know/We No on Eitrigg-US) gave this lecture on WoW at the latest Chaos Communication Conference (23C3). The talk doesn't assume any WoW knowledge, but also doesn't bore those of us who do play (at least not me). It seems to broadly concern itself with WoW as a social space/social experiment, including guild organization, voice chat, real-world/WoW bleed-through, and the implications of having such a huge subscriber base. I found the video quite interesting. I wish it included the Q&A afterwards; maybe we can have our own discussion in the comments here.Previously on Moviewatch
Shawn Fanning's Rupture: social software meets WoW
Shawn Fanning's second post-Napster startup will be far more L2P than P2P -- set to launch sometime next month, Rupture is a virtual social community for World of Warcraft. The details regarding the functionality of the site are a bit slim, but it's clear the project will go beyond something like Warcraft Social, which is a completely external social network to WoW, as well as beyond the data extraction functionality provided by Allakhazam via WowReader and Thottbot via Cosmos plugin. Rupture will reportedly pull in-game data and publish it to a personalized site guilds can use to track stats and better manage their playing. Rupture's investors include Ron Conway and Joi Ito, venture capitalist and level 60 mage of We Know fame. Considering Ito's investment history in social software and stated interest in developing guild management tools, my hunch is that Rupture will look a lot like groupware for guilds. As an officer in my main guild, I'd agree that current in-game management tools are lacking. Tools like GEM are a start, but the idea of a one-stop shop for guild management is appealing. A web-based tool would also be ideal for officers and players who can't fire up the WoW client at work but might have time to log in to the website during the day. Of course, many guilds (including my own) already have their own websites with forums and DKP tracking, so the question will be whether this tool will be compelling enough to replace or augment home-grown systems already in place. A hosted solution like Rupture might be a great solution for a new or smaller guild to access a central management space without requiring someone to have the tech-fu (and the time) to hack something together via PHP Nuke and EQ DKP, etc. What do you guys think -- does your guild get along just fine with your current management systems? Is there a market for this kind of tool?[Thanks, Undying]
Rob Pardo and the Success of Warcraft
Joi Ito has a post up about Rob Pardo and the success of World of Warcraft as a casual game. And, while a lot of people (myself included) believe the game stops being so "casual" when players hit level 60, the experience up to that point is much more casual and accessible than in other games of this nature. And even at level 60, the raiding experience can be casual as well - if you can find, or build, the right type of guild.
Business Lessons in World of Warcraft
While some wonder if we're learning the right things from WoW, others wonder if we aren't paying attention to the right things - specifically how World of Warcraft can teach us how to work together in a business environment. Tech entrepreneur Joi Ito (whom we've mentioned before) spoke this weekend at the ScreenBurn Beta Festival on the lessons businesses might pick up from managing a Warcraft guild. I personally have to wonder why Warcraft is chosen as the example when any multi-player game can have the same teamwork and guild management issues - perhaps its massive popularity is just starting to make these parallels obvious as business-oriented people are pulled into the game world.Update: Ito has a lengthy blog post discussing the topic, as well. Good reading!
