Joichi Ito on WoW (Berlin, 2006)

While my own writing and research is moving towards mods, collaborative game design, and multi-producer games, I’m starting to notice that this hooks in nicely with some recent talks and articles. I found this excellent review of Joichi’s talk at 23C3 in Berlin.

The short of it is that Ito argues that because WoW has become a game played by millions, it is mainstream, and therefore a system of interaction that is shared by a large group of people. In other words, it’s like a language that a lot of people speak, allowing us to share and communicate. Of course, much of this technical in nature. Nonetheless, it’s persuasive to argue that mastering a set of relatively simple tools, like Teamspeak, affords large groups of people (Ito talks about slaying some monster with 40 people by his side) to organize their efforts.

The choice quote I found though, came from someone called Sascha Pohflepp, who apparently also watched the presentation.

“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.)”

This connects very nicely to some of the things that I like so much from James Gee (playing a game is closer to “living inside a symphony than reading a book or watching a movie”), and Steven Johnson’s concept of “Interface Culture.” One could write a dissertation on the social construction of video game interaction and interface, arguing that the various sources that have brought in-game chatting, the multiplicity of the dashboard, teamspeak, sites with information and calendars outside of the actual game, and so on all contribute to the overall game experience. Rather than simply being the product of Blizzard’s vision, this type of activity seems like the older brother version of user-generated content. A group of 8 million WoW players who all understand roughly the same language is no longer some isolated social phenomenon, but a worthwhile topic in the study of digital literacy.

I mean, seriously, how else would you visualize the various layers of a language?

(source)

Big companies like Viacom are buying up those nifty little in-game tools like Xfire, which will make their use an increasingly standard feature to game play. It seems to me that this foreshadows the technological literacy that will be (and to a large extent already is) central to other activities beyond play, like work. Wired already ran an article on this, written by Seely and Thomas. I spoke to that last guy, Thomas, recently at a conference where he stated that “games are great for learning, but terrible for teaching.” (State of Play, NYC 2006)

Part of what I’m trying figure out myself is how people not just play a game together, but design it together, and the way in which they use IM, message boards, and other tools to organize their efforts. Clearly there is some type of self-organizing aspect to these collaborations. And going beyond describing some digital variety of fan culture, I’m looking into the different attitudes of companies that create and produce these games and the issues of ownership that emerge from these relationships.

Anyway, I think Ito’s presentation, and to no lesser extent the comments that it generated, contain some interesting ideas that are central to understanding this phenomenon.

More to follow. Meanwhile, please sit in awe of the choatic complexity of Ito’s own interface, which he allegedly has open and running while doing something like the avant-garde concept of ‘work.’ (See comments section)