Play’s Republic

I was talking to Alyssa today about a WoW guild called We Know and how they plan raids in Second Life, and figured this would be a good time to write about one of the sessions I attended at SXSWi in March.

Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy with Joi Ito and Justin Hall
Panel description: The Internet has helped fuse our work and personal lives together. Understanding and managing those blurred boundaries requires a new kind of literacy, a literacy best learned in online play. Developer of MyWare personal surveillance gaming Justin Hall talks with veteran MUD player and World of Warcraft maven Joi Ito about the future and potential for online games that watch our behavior and encompass our relationships.
Podcast of the entire session | Comprehensive notes from the session

The above links do a much better job of recording/summarizing the session than I could here, but I will say that the session connects well with the Yee article (“The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play”). Ito (a venture capitalist, among other things) talks about the structure of his WoW guild and how a player’s game performance translates into real-world job skills, while Hall (one of the earliest bloggers) discusses how his Passively Multiplayer project brings a game structure to everyday web surfing. Also, Ben Cerveny talks about how Flickr evolved from a massively multiplayer online game (Game Neverending):

What started off as a massively multiplayer online game ended up as an application for trading media, and that was not a coincidence. The thread that we followed was the thread of play. It brought us into a space that related us to to our own media in a totally different way.