Science Library Pad

science conference in World of Warcraft

John Bohannon has quite a lengthy article on the logistics of organizing the first science conference in World of Warcraft.

Slaying Monsters for Science
Science 20 June 2008:
Vol. 320. no. 5883, p. 1592
DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5883.1592c

via Duncan Hull's FriendFeed

You can find more information about the guild they created, Science guild, as well as some info about the conference.  It is reported that full transcripts of the conference itself (which was on the topic of research performed on and in virtual worlds) were recorded, but I couldn't find them.

If this sounds rather esoteric, consider

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. ... World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.

World of Warcraft Reaches 10 Million Subscribers - 22 January 2008

That's active subscriber count, at about $15 per month per subscriber.
In other words, this single game is a billion dollar enterprise.

Second Life seems to get more attention in academic circles, perhaps because it is free to the end user, and you can manipulate the environment, creating objects.  It took me a long time to "get" Second Life, and my eventual conclusion was that it was like being inside of a programming language.  It is not a game in the conventional sense.  Second Life is platform, not narrative.

By contrast, World of Warcraft (WoW or just Warcraft) [1] gives you a huge and (if your computer is up to the task) high-performance, visually-rich environment to explore.  I am often somewhat disappointed that most of us have tremendously powerful computers but we rarely are presented with any software that fully exploits those capabilities.  Google Earth was the first application in the past few years that I found truly revolutionary.  Getting a guided tour of WoW from John, and seeing the endless detail of its cities and countryside, was the second time in recent years that I was truly impressed by the "step change" in what is now possible.  The game world is enormous, and completely consistent.  Bridges don't stick out into thin air, paths don't run across water... everywhere you go, there is a richly detailed world.  In addition, the world is live (and dangerous).

[1] Technically Warcraft refers to any of a number of games from Blizzard, previous versions were not full multiplayer worlds.  I will use it just as shorthand for World of Warcraft in this posting.

I've written a few times about Warcraft, as well as having an entire Second Life category.
August 27, 2007  World of Warcraft... in The Lancet
January 14, 2007  a library quest
January 11, 2007  World of Warcraft has over 8 million subscribers
December 5, 2006  more Second Life, plus South Park [and Warcraft]

If you want to know more about the logistics of holding a Warcraft conference, some very game-specific info is below:

By live, I mean that you are not alone in the world.  If you are flying and you see fighting going on below you, this isn't just some game cinematics, it's real people somewhere in the world, playing the game.  In the cities, hundreds of human-controlled characters are busy shopping, banking, and selling.

There are clearly very sophisticated proximity and latency algorithms powering an engine in which groups of geographically dispursed players can coordinate on tasks where a second's delay is literally the (game world) difference between life and death.

With a huge cash flow, Blizzard is able to not only sustainably grow the infrastructure of the game, but to continuously add to the game content as well.  An entirely new world, Outland, was added to the original world of Azeroth.

Given that this is a complex and mostly unconstrained, live-running game world, it is not surprising that the logistics of organising a non-game event are substantial, and the Science article is mostly about that experience.

Here are a few things you need to know:
* You start off as a level 1 character, in your race's starting location (a location always some distance from a city)
* You can travel by walking, but the amount of aggression (aggro) you attract depends on the level difference between you and your enemies.  At level 1, you aggro everything.
* While you cannot[2] be attacked by other human-controlled characters (unlike many games of this type), there are world beasts wandering around that can and will attack.  Wandering around is a recipe for a quick death.  You are somewhat safer (you generate less aggro) if walking on a defined path or road, but at level 1, even this does not provide full safety - beasts near the edge of the road will run on it to kill you.
* Level 1 characters have so few health points that they die very quickly in battle.  Often a single hit will kill them.
* There are two "factions", Horde and Alliance.  They have cities and outposts which are guarded by computer-controlled guards who are high-level (usually the maximum player level, 70, or higher).  They WILL attack characters from the opposing faction.  There are some neutral cities where both factions can meet, but they are in medium to high-level areas.
* Travel in the game takes real time, walking or running is slowest.  Mounted travel (e.g. horses) is not available to low-level characters.  Any level of character can access flight paths, but they have to go to the flight end points first and they have to be able to pay (there is limited free public transit, such as the Deeprun Tram).
* The game is organized into realms, each realm is a copy of the entire virtual world.  Individual characters are bound to their realm, and can only see and communicate with other players in that realm.
* When you die, you can be brought back to life, but it requires either travel (to "get back" to your body) or high-level characters with resurrection skills or equipment
* Equipment (such as better armor) costs money, and is constrained by levels (i.e. you can't give a level 1 character a set of level 70 armor).
* It is possible you may attracted "griefers" who, while they couldn't attack your party directly, can not only run around shouting and being generally annoying, but can also "pull" monsters into the conference area, whereupon the monsters may start attacking conference attendees.
* When they are killed, monsters will "respawn" in roughly the same location shortly thereafter.  You can't permanently clear an area of monsters; you have to keep killing them as they respawn.

[2] Unless you explicitly flag yourself for Player-versus-Player (PvP) or are on a PvP server

So a conference presents numerous challenges:
* If you want a broad attendance, you need to support both experienced characters and newbies/n00bs (level 1 characters) who bring many challenges: they aren't familiar with the game, and it is a dangerous environment.
* Additionally level 1 characters are squishy (easily killed by beasts and guards) and have very little money.
* Experienced players are likely to be scattered across many different realms and belong to existing guilds; they are unlikely to want to change realm, although they might temporarily change guild.

So the best you can do is find a realm with enough high-level players who are interested in helping, both financially and in terms of offence and defence.  A conference is the WoW equivalent of an Escort Quest - you have someone you need to protect as they move from location to location.  However it's an Escort Quest on an unprecendented scale - in WoW the largest collaborative efforts, raids, are 4 combined teams of 5 players, for a total of 20 people.  For a conference, you may have hundreds of attendees. (Although it is true that sometimes groups this large are organised for the fun of e.g. attacking another city, similar to the end event of the conference.)

To do it properly, you'd have to find a defensible position for the main conference sessions.  Then you have to get everyone there alive.  Then if you want to do tours or field trips, you have to again keep everyone alive.  We're talking classic medieval age warfare.  In Azeroth they can't be attacked from the air, so you need to form a defence perimeter, with high-level characters clearing away all possible threats, additional high-levels scattered throughout the group to provide assistance for any problems or threats that may pop up inside the perimeter and characters with healing or resurrection powers in case something befalls the low-levels despite all the other efforts.  The logistics of it are actually quite an interesting challenge.

UPDATE:

Also I forgot to mention that realms are limited in the number of character accounts they will permit, for performance reasons, and high-level characters are more likely to be on realms that are full or nearly full.

For these reasons it seems to me this best option, if it were possible, would be for Blizzard to provide a test server and allow users to copy or temporarily move their characters over for the duration of the event.  I'm not saying they should make the environment otherwise any different (i.e. no "holodeck safeties on") but just provide a dedicated conference realm.

ENDUPDATE

If you want to get some idea of the richness of the environment, you can see my World of Warcraft - solo set on Flickr.  It's more "stuff I thought was cool" than a comprehensive overview of the world.  Here's one screenshot:

in which net searching gets doubly disrupted

Internet searching is by no means a stable space.
Remember simple old Google?  Type in keyword, get a link?

Well now it's type in keyword, get suggested related searches, a link, a bunch of subpages of the link, and (sometimes) a site-specific search box.

As if that wasn't enough, along comes Firefox 3, with character matching in both URLs and page titles, when you type in the main URL bar.

Is Firefox 3 matching going to mean less searches sent to Google, as people navigate within their own set of URLs?  Is it going to change the page titles we use, so that we get better matches?  Why does it rank VALA ahead of ALA in the pattern match?

focus, attention, searching divides: where are you looking?

I wonder if, by analogy to the digital divide, we also have a whole set of other divides, related to focus, attention and searching.

That is, although someone may have the same level of access to technology (e.g. we are all working in the same office in front of the same computers), we may have very different approaches to using the technology.

Specifically, how much of your attention to you devote to exploring your digital environment, where do you focus your attention, and how to you locate (search) out things to focus attention upon?

I think there are three stereotypical styles:

* interactive attention: the characteristic Gen Y / Millenial style where their main focus is on SMS and Instant Messaging, with multiple chat windows open, as they do other things in the background.  In this case, your focus is your "messagestream".  If you want to share info, you message it.  If you want to find info, you just message a friend, you ask before search.

* web attention: a web-centric style where your main focus is web feeds: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, RSS reader, delicious, etc.  Your main focus is your "webstream".  If you want to share info, you typically just make a note of it for yourself in one of your web tools, and assume others will find it (although there may be ways that you flag info in order to get into one of their webstreams).  If you want to find info, you first check your web streams, then you may do a Google search.

* email attention: your main focus is your Outlook email and/or your BlackBerry.  You live by your "emailstream".  The main way for information to get to you is by someone sending an email message or through a mailing list (listserv).  Since Outlook by default has terrible search capability, folders are the main way you locate things.  You may try to locate info by emailing someone who may know, or by posting to a mailing list.

Now these are obviously extremes but are to illustrate a point, which is there is very little overlap between these three styles.  Interactives get their information from peers in realtime.  Web attention people give and take information with their peer crowd as well as the entire world, asynchronously.   Emailers have slow asynchronous peer channels as their main information source.

This creates a lot of expectation gaps trying to cross silos.  If I'm web, I'm living in my browser.  You can send all the emails and mailing list posts you want, unless it shows up somewhere with a URL, it's not getting much of my attention.  Similarly, if I want to communicate something, I want to stick it in a web stream for you to consume, not have to duplicate the information in some closed unsearchable Exchange system where it will get filed in some folder and lost.

How does information circulate in your organisation?  Have you found ways to break communication silos?  Is your main focus your IM window, your web browser, or your email inbox?

FriendFeed

As I've mentioned before when discussing lifestreaming, FriendFeed is a way to aggregate all the various pieces of your life together in one place (well, the pieces you can remember about anyway).

In addition to this, it provides a centralised place to rate and discuss any of the elements you post, regardless of their source.  This enables discussion threads around e.g. a Twitter item, a kind of structured discussion that is not (easily) possible to have within Twitter itself (see e.g. Darren Barefoot's posting about this issue).

There are quite a few people in FriendFeedspace now, and I'm back posting after a vacation, so here's mine

http://friendfeed.com/scilib

Although it doesn't have dedicated support for every possible service, you can hack FF a bit by putting any RSS feed into the "blog" section.  I probably have a few more sources to add but the major ones are there.

Nature Network gives you a hub

Nature Network now provides the ability for people to specify their city, and they say that "If enough people from your area join, specify their hub, and are active on Nature Network, we may launch a full-fledged hub for your area".

Surely I can't be the only person on Nature Network in Ottawa?

http://network.nature.com/hubs/ottawa

You can specify your city under Your profile->edit your profile->change your location
Yes, it does have a location database to help disambiguate e.g. London, Ontario from London, England.

Upload a video about the Internet for OECD meeting on future of Internet Economy

Angel Gurría, the OECD Secretary General, invites Internet users to upload a short video on a dedicated YouTube video channel answering the following question:

“How can the Internet make the world a better place?” www.youtube.com/FutureInternet

The event itself is the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy

www.oecd.org/FutureInternet

17-18 June 2008 in Seoul, Korea

I don't see an official tag declared so I am going to go with oecdfuturenet2008

I covered the precursor, OECD-Canada Forum on the Participative Web, see notes at

http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/oecdwebforum2007/

and official blogging in the OECD Participative Web Forum blog.

As a side note, I put a fair amount of effort into a posting I wrote for the blog about Ottawa downtown tourism, perhaps the information may be of use and you're welcome to reuse pieces of it (with citation).