Ars Electronica transcribed my World of Warcraft talk from 23C3 last year for publication of the article in the Ars Electronica Catalog 07, Goodbye Privacy (Schöpf, Christine / Stocker, Gerfied (Eds.): Ars Electronica 2007: Goodbye Privacy. Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz 2004). I fixed up the transcription with minor edits. I thought I'd share it although it is a bit old.

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One year ago, I blogged about Phillip Torrone musing about the idea of WoW credit cards. Now it's true.

I'll be giving a short (10 min) talk about the World of Warcraft at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco later today. One paper that inspired some of my thinking (and will inspiring a longer blog post soon) is an excellent working paper by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas that you can get from the USC Annenberg Center Working Papers site.

Special thanks to Kazpah for helping me put together my slides...

Steven Levy was an embedded journalist in We Know for awhile as research for an article that he just finished about the World of Warcraft for Newsweek.

I wrote an article about the World of Warcraft for the last issue of Wired as part of the 2006 Rave Awards section. It is now available on their site.

This should have been posted with the last post, but I wanted to check the facts with Rob before posting it...

Chris Anderson asked me to participate in giving a toast at the Wired Rave Awards dinner about why WoW was so great and giving a Raver award to Rob Pardo, Lead Game Designer of World of Warcraft (WoW), and his team. I had my own opinions about what made WoW so successful, but I asked Rob with whom I had the opportunity of sitting next to at the dinner. We had a longish conversation about games and WoW and was impressed by Rob's insights and practical experience.

Rob was a guild leader of a hardcore raiding guild on Everquest. Rob is a hardcore gamer. He loved the game, but realized that there were things that could be better designed. He looked at all of the MMOs and together with his team, built a game that was better in each of the different components than any of its competitors while keeping the core culture and functionality of MMOs. They added some important new features including the rest system, team PvP without segregating players from the opposing factions, and a completely quest driven experience, which were new innovations. They also paid attention to issues that existing games experienced or they anticipated would experience and designed WoW to deal with them.

For instance, WoW does not allow buying and selling game gold. However, according to Rob, it doesn't break the economy as some people think. The game is designed to minimize the negative impact of "farmers". The quests and and equipment are designed so that there are many key things that you can't buy with game gold. The issue of gold buying is primarily a matter of players feeling that it is unfair - the great thing about WoW and similar MMOs is that everyone starts equally regardless of what they do in real life.

Although Rob was a hardcore player in Everquest, he designed WoW so that it allowed casual players to have as much fun as hardcore players. It really shows and as a guild custodian of a guild that has many casual players, the ability for casual players to have fun in WoW is very important. Rob mentioned that one of they keys to success of a game is to make sure that the game is fun in the first 5 minutes. I think many game developers forget this and focus on gamers who are "serious" and willing to invest significant time to learn to play or wait a long time to have their first "fun event". I think it is the breadth and diversity of the players that Rob tried to appeal to that is the key to success of WoW and he did it through attention to detail and trying to get each part right rather than focus on a single killer feature.

It reminds me a bit of the book "From Good to Great".

Joi Ito & Rob Pardo @ Wired Rave Awards
Originally uploaded by JasonDeFillippo.

Jason took this picture of Rob Pardo, the lead game developer of World of Warcraft and VP of Game Design of Blizzard and me at the Wired Rave Awards reception last night. Rob and his team won a Wired Rave Award this year and I wrote the article for the magazine. It was a big treat to get to hang out with Rob and get his view on MMOs and WoW. Thanks Rob and thanks Wired!

Our World of Warcraft guild has been running Molten Core (one of the end-games) on weekends. We now have a fairly reliable turnout of 40 people for the raids and have started making progress with the bosses. We cleared Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas and just took down Garr. (smallish mov / bigger avi / 270MB hi-quality mov) It took us a few tries and isn't as easy (especially the setup) as it looks in the video, but it should be pretty easy from now on. We seem to have our communications and planning relatively organized now and with the help of some of the more experienced players should be able to keep moving until we hit a boss that requires us to get new gear. What is interesting to me about these raids is the combination of preparation, planning and real-time coordination necessary to execute properly and I imagine how these skills could be used for conducting other sorts of activities.