Month: January 2011

Frozen Sharing

Sharing a photo by making it available online constitutes sharing even if no one ever looks at it. This “frozen sharing” creates great potential value. Enormous databases of images, text, videos, and so on include many items that have never been looked at or read, but it costs little to keep those things available, and they may be useful to one person, years in the future. That tiny bit of value may seem too small to care about, but with two billion potential providers, and two billion potential users, tiny value times that scale is huge in aggregate. Much creative energy that was previously personal has acquired a shared component, even if only in frozen sharing.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Our fellow MMO bloggers will be familiar with the phenomenon of getting comments or sudden bursts of hits on old posts. Dig those trailing comment dates as people still reminisce about AC2, wonder what happened at the end of Borderlands, and read your Death Knight leveling guide from 2008. Feel free to comment with a link your favorite “wow, people are still looking at this” post from your site.

: Zubon

2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

I am too antsy to work. Most community managers on the West Coast aren’t even awake, but it is the first business day of 2011. The 2011. The Year of the MMO. It feels like something should be coming any second, but I have to tell myself that things were not so different a week ago. All morning I have been trying to write this post. What are my baseless speculations on the MMO genre this year?

Continue reading 2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

Alt Souls

I have nothing useful to add to existing reviews of Rift as it stands in beta. It seems to be an evolutionary improvement on existing MMOs, but nothing grabs me by the lapels and says I must play. In the first few rifts I have encountered, I am not seeing the “2.0” part of “PQ 2.0”; the first Defiant rift parallels the first Chaos PQ nicely, down to the boss that dies in less than 10 seconds because every character will see that PQ/rift. If you like the current crop of MMOs and want a better one, Rift is for you. The downside is trying to get all your friends to quit WoW to go play it. I could not even get my friends to play WoW on the same server.

One encouraging thing is how the soul system affects altoholics. I have long been asking for the ability to play multiple classes on the same character. Now I can. If I level-cap four characters, I have access to every possible class and class combination in the game, and I would be able to swap between at least a dozen of them in less than a minute. That is really handy. Most have been referring to souls as talent trees, which they are, but they are also how you cram the usual 8-16 classes into 4 base classes. You even get overlap within those 4, such every base class can fill multiple roles, rather than just having minor varieties on how you deal damage.

: Zubon

From Personal to Civic Value

Increases in personal satisfaction, though, are not all that’s at stake. In terms of social, as opposed to individual, value, we care a lot about how our cognitive surplus gets used. Participating in [crowdsourced crisis information] creates more value for society than participating in [making lolcats]; making and sharing open source software creates value for more people than making and sharing Harry Potter fan fiction. The value from Ushahidi or open source software is more than the sum of the personal satisfactions of the participants; nonparticipants also derive value from the effort. You can think of this scale of value as rising from personal to communal to public to civic.
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One such form is personal sharing, done among otherwise uncoordinated individuals; think ICanHasCheezburger. Another, more involved form is communal sharing, which takes place inside a group of collaborators; think Meetup.com groups for post-partum depression. Then there is public sharing, when a group of collaborators actively wants to create a public resource; think the Apache software project [or Wikipedia]. Finally, civic sharing is when a group is actively trying to transform society; think Pink Chaddi. The spectrum from personal to communal to public to civic describes the degree of value created for participants versus nonparticipants.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Our MMO world tends strongly towards communal sharing, where even our public sharing (a wiki for every game) is mostly of value within the community, but see tomorrow’s post about how that value expands.

: Zubon

Scheduling and Potential Apologies

In a very unusual turn of events, I will be offline for most of the next two weeks. In fact, I am already there, having scheduled posts for my absence. I will apologize now if any of them turn out to be really inappropriate due to events that had not happened when I scheduled them. Nice boat.

I have the last of the Cognitive Surplus quotes scheduled. Also apologies to Clay Shirky and his publishers if I have gone beyond fair use. There are lots of good ideas to discuss here. I presume I am helping business more than hurting it, but that’s your call if you want me to take posts down. (The potential irony is noted, yes.)

: Zubon