Nation of Adoration
World of Warcraft’s seasonal holiday events temporarily reduce player interest in fishing. It’s always been the case, but the decline in fishing seems to be becoming more extreme over time:
The graph’s y-axis is the percentage decline in page views at El’s Extreme Anglin’ from the 7 days before each event, to the first 7 days of the event. Pageviews are a good proxy for overall angler interest. El generates hundreds of thousands of page views each week, so even small changes are significant. The x-axis orders events by date, from January 2008. The axis isn’t scaled correctly to show time, but holidays are fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. Events are shown by green dots, with a shortened date (month and year) and the name of the event.
The data is expressed as a percentage of the previous week, because while interest in fishing “waxes and wains” from year-to-year, changes week-to-week are normally minor.
All the events included last at least 7 days. Where one holiday runs concurrently with another event (for example, the “Lunar Festival” and “Love is in the Air” often clash), only the first event in the sequence is included. Interest in fishing also changes dramatically in the month new content is added, so events that clash with major fishing patches have been excluded (Noblegarden 2008 with patch 2.4, Hallow’s End 2008 with patch 3.0.2, and Noblegarden/Children’s Week 2009 with patch 3.1). Winter Veil is also excluded: The period leading to Christmas is particularly unusual – first students stop studying and have a lot of time to play, and then many players stop playing to spend time with family. This causes large changes in activity from week-to-week, which makes it hard to isolate Winter Veil in the data.
Only 12 separate sets of data can be compared. There is one out-lier – Midsummer 2008 – perhaps the early stages of Wrath of the Lich King testing may have caused a small traffic spike in the week before? The pattern shown on the graph is not certain. But I’m growing confident that events are increasingly impacting on fishing activity.
But why? Read more of this article »
Valuing Nothing
In 2007 I wrote some introductory Thoughts on a Socio-Economic Environment based on Nothing. This article continues to explore the value of things in a highly intangible, knowledge-based economy. It wanders through internet-based payment systems, economic structure, role of government, organisation of information, community, and society, before disappearing into the realms of philosophy. It contains no answers, but may prove thought-provoking. Read more of this article »
Paying for Points
This article examines the sociological implications of the different reward systems used in virtual worlds.
The original WeeWorld article attracted a lot of feedback from WeeWorld’s users. One common question was, why do we have to pay for points? Or even, “WHY DOWE HAVE TO PAY FOR POINTS!!!!”
Why indeed?
- WeeWorld has 2 kinds of points: Gold points we buy with Dollars (“monetary rewards”), and green points we earn by doing things in the world (“achievement rewards”).
- Gold points can buy more things in WeeWorld than green points. So the things we want most, tend to be bought with gold points. In other worlds, achievement rewards (like green points) are more important.
- The things we want are things that not everyone has. We want those things because it helps us make friends. To stop everyone having them, those things cost points. If those things were free, everyone could have them, and then we wouldn’t want them.
- Gold points are bought with our parents’ money. So some of our friends have less points, because their parents don’t have as much money. We may want to help them by giving them some of our points. That helps us keep friends.
- Unfortunately, in WeeWorld, gold points cannot be easily shared. So WeeMees with lots of things tend to have those things because their parents’ have lots of money to buy them. This is “unfair”.
- In other worlds it is easier to earn achievement rewards (like green points). This means we could earn our own rewards, instead of our parents earning them for us. But those rewards cannot be shared. That means we cannot help our friends who have fewer rewards. That might also become “unfair”.
- Perhaps gold points would work better if we could share them, and we could earn gold points ourselves?
That’s the simple answer. With apologies for “we” and “our”. This article explains and expands those ideas. Read more of this article »
Why We Travel
If we could eliminate transportation from our daily lives, would we want to? Or do we still need to travel, even if we have nowhere to go?
This article explores the desire to travel – to make economically irrational transport journeys. It ponders the apparently unnecessary role of travel in virtual worlds. It considers how travel contributes to immersion within the world, and how such travel can be substituted. Finally, the article addresses some of the difficulties in bringing lessons from the virtual back into the physical world. Read more of this article »
Financing Hyper-Virality in the Clouds
This article probes the implications of cloud computing for financing very rapidly distributed internet-based services and products. It contains rough, inadequately researched thoughts, sparked from discussions at the recent CloudCamp Scotland. Read more of this article »
Exploration is Dead. Long Live Exploration!
Something happened at the start of July 2008 that only happens once every 2 years. For a brief period, everything about the world was not public knowledge. A handful of people worked day and night to fill this chasm of information. To document everything that was suddenly new and uncertain. Meanwhile the world filled up with hardened veterans, many of whom seem to struggle with, well, everything:
“How do I get to Northrend?” – Well, perhaps that new harbour or zeppelin tower that’s been built might give you a clue?
“Where’s Dalaran?” – Did you try riding to the end of the road and then looking up to see what’s blocking out the sun? (Dalaran is pictured right.)
The world is, of course, the World of Warcraft. And the 2-yearly occasion is the start of public testing of the latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King: The only time a significant proportion of the game world changes.
What’s alarming is that these questions are not from new, inexperienced players. These are from people that have already played the existing game for months or years. They clearly want to know, but seem to have lost the basic ability to explore the game world themselves.
This article explores the concept of “exploration”, and tries to explain how one of the most complex virtual worlds ever created has become popular among players that are not natural explorers. Read more of this article »
Notes from Disneyland
I was finally talked into visiting Silicon Valley, the region of California at the heart of many of the technological innovations of the last 50 years. This is what I came back with.
“It’s the little differences. I mean they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just – it’s just there it’s a little different.” – Quentin Tarantino
Everything is bigger, of course. The exit ramp from the aircraft, the portions of food, the hotel rooms, the sprawl of the city. That might go without saying, but it hits you like the cars should when you forget to look the right way before crossing the street. Actually, drivers are remarkably careful.
Technology is deeply embedded in the local economy. From the local food delivery service’s pickup trunk emblazoned with the domain name “waiter.com“, to the head offices of businesses most will ever only experience via a website. The results are obvious too. Ramshackle houses occupy land worth millions of dollars, while local commercial centres seem to consist primarily of restaurants and bars. An alien might struggle to understand what everyone did to earn a Dime.
So why liken it to Disneyland? It isn’t just the inherent unreality of the place. Or the fact that it makes me feel about 25 years younger. (That’s almost a negative age.)
For an explanation, take a trip up Judah Street on the San Francisco tram. At each stop the doors open and the mass of humanity that didn’t make it hobble on board. Inequality isn’t an American phenomena, but it is far more extreme than I expected. Yet the society seems to function strangely oblivious to how the “other half” live.
There was just one moment when I felt a real pulse. Enough to convince me that Disney magic wasn’t complete. Paul Saffo commented that the biotech revolution would ultimately lead to a divergence of the species, as the wealthy became able to extend their lives. That was enough to silence the room.
