IL2007: World of Warcraft Versus Second Life

IL2007: World of Warcraft Versus Second Life
Presenters: Cindy Hill, Mary Auckland, Lori Bell, and Liz Lawley

Cindy Hill talked about an immersive world that Sun Microsystems is in the process of creating.  Sun Microsystems has 46% of the employees not having a physical office space.  Sun wanted to experiment with using a virtual world to keep the employees connected.  As people work off campus, there is a fear that there is a death of brainstorming, a lack of social fabric, a lack of an identity as an employee, a lack of recognition for remote employees.  The physical facilities became more collaborative and flexible.  IT became more flexible, and everything was identity/person-based, not location-based.  Their virtual world, MPK20, offered all employees a space to hold business.  The library staff at Sun had a lot to do with the project, which shows a great deal of foresight on the part of Sun's leadership (or maybe that's just my personal professional bias).  This area creates a sense of contact, person, and place.  What brings people into Second Life is interaction and self-expression.  The library needed to think about archiving interactions and documentation that occurs in the virtual world, as that is all company intellectual property.  She showed us some screen shots of this interesting take on virtual worlds.  There are a number of videos on YouTube with information about the project).  This was so exciting to me.  As an oft-times telecommuter, I enjoyed hearing about the possibility of retaining that sense of community regardless of wherever I am physically.  One more tool to make people's lives easier.

Mary Auckland talked about World of Warcraft.  A huge variety of people play WoW--6 million players, spending an average of $20 per month.  It crosses generations, genders, geospace, and cultures.  She says that she appreciates the fact that she can be known for who she is and what she does--not what she looks like or how old she is.  She has been taking instruction from a 14 year old.  She noted that her communication skills have changed as she played, including learning in-jokes, lingo, abbreviations, etc.  She says that she plays to relax, but also to sharpen her mental abilities.  She brought home the fact that gaming involves a lot of text.  Progression through the levels requires a lot of reading, reading hints and tricks on websites, and simply reading the information about their own characters and general information by tapping external websites like the WoWWiki.  It was an interesting talk, and because of the popularity of the game I think libraries should support this through appropriate equipment in the libraries and game guides at the least.

Lori Bell discussed the differences between Second Life and World of Warcraft.  She noted that SL and WoW are probably the two most-used games right now.  Both have a lot of accounts.  In SL everything is user-created--the beauty is that everything is always changing, but there is clunky software and a lot of updates.  In WoW the graphics and avatars are very detailed because they are company-created.  In Second Life you can play games,  bu

Liz Lawley spoke about her experiences in a number of games, including Second Life.  She spoke about the strengths and weaknesses of each environment, the differences between games and virtual worlds, the "grind"--both IRL and in games--and the importance for all organizations to learn from the popularity and success of games to make a better service or product...libraries included.

IL2007