Gaming, the new blog hype
Inspired by this video, I felt an urge to further dig into the world of gaming and especially social gaming, such as Second life and World of Warcraft. Personally, I’ve never tried either of them, so I’ll state right away that I’m no expert on these and trying to offer some kind of insight without any experience of the actual services.
The fragmented nature of web 2.0 has been one that influenced the creation of web services for sometime. We, as users, often tend to apply several different technologies and products for managing the content and interests of our day-to-day life. This has created a universe of tabbed browsing, multiple IM windows and social bookmarking services. A number of diversions from one single action to a range of different brain activities occurring all at once. This is quite the opposite from the world of gaming where you succumb to one action, one window in one world for hours and hours. Which means a totally different focus and also use of the web, its the social web but on a much deeper and profound level. When you interact with people in a very personal way and also since there’s no distractions and often a level of anonymity, there is a purer interaction since it’s likely that both users are concentrating on just this interaction and nothing else. After I started writing this post there has been some excitement in the blogosphere for services that create new platforms to interact inside the already established community, if this will take focus from the gaming part or not I can’t really tell.
In a world where we’re often skimming multiple conversations these kind of interactions are very different and a totally different way of communicating via the web. Both Second life and World of Warcraft have already proven the potential of gaming on the web and how community is everything. It is a new use of the internet, not as much as a portal or search engine, but a way of life. Really. In the game, you have most of your friends and the excitement in your personal life . It often develops from your gaming persona. I read a story about a women using Second life and the excitement she felt when expressing how she got married in the game and how people cried when they witnessed the ceremony really proofs the passionate use that it means to be apart of games like these. This is one of the major reasons why they also will be so immensely important in the coming years and how the techniques of the Internet can emerge into a game.
The passion of these games have been quite widely recognized among companies, and there are a number of stores and campaign sites that target towards the Second life users. I wouldn’t say this is only a bad thing, since Second Life strives to be a “second life” and creates a world as close to reality as possible. Hence, in the real world, we’re exposed to millions of commercial messages everyday and it would be strange if it weren’t so in virtual world as well. This is a way of presenting commercial messages in a pleasant manner, you can to some extent chose how many messages you want receive and they reinforce the sense of “reality” within the virtual world.
In conclusion, there are many interesting aspects of the gaming culture on the web and it’s commercial potential is surfacing. There will be development within this sphere both in terms of technical matters but also culturely. As people have grown up and, to a certain extent, been educated through WoW, they’ll grow into adulthood and demand other alternatives and options to develop within the gaming world as they develop.
[tags]WoW, World of Warcraft, Second life, Gaming, Techcrunch, Scobleshow, Podtech, Liz Lawley[/tags]
Second life, World of Warcraft, Nätspel
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