Now that we’ve all had a chance to write all over the nice clean walls of our wiki like so many zealous 5-year-olds with crayons I thought we might take a step back and see how our masterpiece is progressing.
Despite the fact that we’re all newbies at this whole thing I think we should be proud of ourselves so far. But, there’s definitely more to be done, and if we all put in a bit more work we’ll have something to be really proud of by Tuesday. So I’ve been cruising around the site and I’ve put together a list of things that everyone can do to improve the overall presentation and substance of the wiki.
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It seems to be a bad time to be a pirate. The nautically-minded ones have been served some harsh justice by the Navy (which, despite my “swishy liberal” opinions on the military I’ve got to admit I felt a little middle American pride at the effectiveness of our “methods of negotiation”) and the content industry swashbucklers have been sentenced to a year of jail time along with some hefty fines. Wired magazine’s blog has had solid coverage of the event throughout, so if you’re interested to hear about it, this is the place to go.
The content industries have applauded it as a victory, but traffic to TPB has substantially increased, they’ve sold bucketloads(not a legitimate economic metric, even in Sweden) of a 6$ IP anonymization service, and membership to Sweden’s Pirate Party, a copyright reform political party, has increased by 50%. All in all, it’s a dubious victory at best. The real victory for the content industries is not that they’ve convinced these four people, but this ruling has (pending appeal) stopped Sweden from becoming a haven for piracy.
For more commentary, check out the “On the Media” post (on bottom right hand corner of the blog).
The Pirate Bay’s message to it’s supporters?
“Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. 
”
Seriously.
In this screencast and other assorted rich media, I’ve attempted to survey the world of linking virtual resources to real world resources. More than just gold farmers in China, this industry represents almost a billion dollars in profits. Perhaps more importantly, it highlights a vanguard example of where international law might be headed-into the world of virtual economics.
Above is an imaginary “virtual currency” commission by Wired magazine as a part of a piece on virtual economies. The article is lengthy, but it goes into detail about the RMT industry using a compelling narrative about a young venture capitalist.
I also discovered an interesting subculture of World of Warcraft players reacting against gold farmers, often times in a frighteningly racist way. Below is an anti-gold farming machinima with surprisingly high production value and effort level. I couldn’t include this aspect of gold farming in my post in detail, but it’s definitely an area worth exploring if you’re curious.
A Gold Farmer\’s Story
And if you’re really, really curious I highly recommend Play Money by Julian Dibbell. Dibbell is perhaps the most preeminent scholar in the field of virtual economies (even if that’s a bit lofty of a title) and he definitely knows how to talk about this unique and idiosyncratic industry in an intelligent and entertaining way.
Finally, I apologize for the monotony of my voice over, I’m suffering from a rather exciting headcold and am having a difficult time feeling dynamic and engaging.
This site has a good list of screencasting programs for windows. “FRAPS” is a really good program if your capturing high resolution video, but I’m not sure how robust the free trial is.
In part two of my ongoing travelogue through the World of Warcraft I discuss the basics of creating value, trading within the game, and transition to talking about the real world economic effects of the WoW economy via gold farmers.
If you’ve checked your facebook any time since after 9PM you might have noticed some jerk space shifted all over your news feed. You also might have noticed that jerk is me. (If you don’t mind, please let me know if nothing shows up on your home page, because there should be a bunch of notes.)
I took a while trying to figure out who or what I would shiftspace, but after a while I settled on facebook, mostly because it was the most controversial interface I could think of. I thought about space shifting places like shell oil with little picture swapping vandalism, but that felt a little juvenile. Then I thought about critiquing the whitehouse.gov site, but that place is super slick, and I couldn’t think of anything constructive to say.
On a related note, did anyone else feel like they could have used some examples from shift space (if only we knew the founder and could tell him) about how you might be able to use the different tools. I understand that once people see how you’re “supposed” to use something it makes innovation more difficult, but I felt a little directionless as I was trying to shift spaces.
Also, the picture swapping is a great idea but I spent almost an hour getting more and more frustrated by it kind of working on somethings sometimes.
Edit: I had the notes set up so they weren’t as intrusive, but my formatting went away and now it looks ugly and annoying. I’m trying to fix it, but for now, my apologies.
Below you should find a screencast from inside the World of Warcraft. As I’ve recently discovered, super simple machinima is infinitely more challenging than I had previously imagined. However, I hope you enjoy my introduction to the 4th travelogue.
I used tools that came with WoW to capture this video. If you are thinking of screencasting, I was recommended SnapzProX but multiple people. Alternatively, I would not use CaptureMe as it’s super slow and choppy.
World of Warcraft has 11.5 million users each paying about $20 a month. If you’re thinking that’s a lot of money, it is. In 2007 World of Warcraft (WoW) generated 1.1 billion dollars in revenue. I don’t remember what the quote was exactly, but in one of our readings somebody said, “The internet hasn’t created nearly as many new business models as we had hoped it would.” After hearing that, I started thinking about what kind of business models have been created by the internet, or at least changed by the internet. From there I arrived at Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMO’s, of which WoW is the biggest. The business models of video game companies have changed in some ways as a result of the internet, but only some companies have been quick to monetize these changes.
In order to explore the business of the world or warcraft, I’m going to be doing some reporting from inside the game, hopefully illuminating the profitable economics of a world that is hiding 1.1 billion dollars behind elves and dragons. Although I hope to not exclusively deal with WoW, this world will be my starting point in talking about the businesses that grow around fantasy worlds.
Admittedly, that title has little or nothing to do with this response, but it just sounds really good. I chose to read Yochai Benkler’s response to Digital Maoism because he was an author of “Common Based Peer Production and Virtue” so I thought he would provide a very opposite critique of Lanier’s article. Unfortunately, he more or less just rehashed the article that I read last week instead of directly combating Lanier’s article. On the other hand, I was initially very persuaded by Lanier’s article but reading Benkler’s article brought me towards a more middle ground.
Lanier is essentially lamenting the loss of the individual within certain types of technology. Meta-aggregators, wiki’s, and algorithms are all ways of deemphasizing the individual, he feels, but I feel that Benkler counters his argument well saying,
“It [social production] is based on enhanced individual capabilities, employing widely distributed computation, communication, and storage in the hands of individuals with insight, motivation, and time, and deployed at their initiative through technical and social networks, either individually or in loose voluntary associations.”
I think that Lanier took the idea that individuality is “lost” and ran with it, forcing us to take that as a given. If you agree that it is, then his argument is both frightening and convincing. However, if you look at it more like Benkler, it is less convincing. Benkler’s perspective is that just because there isn’t a name attached to a work, that doesn’t mean it’s not the work of talented and unique individuals. Once something becomes collective in name that doesn’t mean it takes on a totally new identity.
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