For the past decade or so, I have had people come up to me and treat me as though I were an expert on Doctor Who. This is because I co-authored a book with Doctor Who expert John Tulloch (Doctor... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

This has been my week for dealing with law professors -- having engaged in a conversation with Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler last week at the MIT Communications Forum, I was pleased to find a review of Convergence Culture over... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

We've been getting some calls and messages here at the Comparative Media Studies Program regarding the situation with Mike Doonesbury's daughter getting lotteried out of our Introduction to Media Studies subject. See the most recent installments from the long running... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Let's take a moment today to think about the shifting status of the pilot episode on American television -- a worthy topic in the midst of the rolling out of a battery of new television shows across the various networks.... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

A while back, I posted here my choices for Flow's television poll: Flow is an online zine where media scholars share their insights about contemporary developments in the medium with what they hope will be a diverse and engaged general... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

I have found myself this week struggling to put together my thoughts on the concept of civic media in light of a series of conversations and encounters I had last week: for one thing, there was the public conversation which... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

My book tour promoting Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide takes me to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria next week. Here are the details: Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson Wednesday,... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Yesterday, I ran an outtake from Convergence Culture which centered around the efforts of Scott McCloud to build public interet in micropayments as a means of supporting digitally distributed comics. Like McCloud, I believed that micropayments offered perhaps the best... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

This is the final in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide dealing with the ways that the comics industry is responding to shifts in the media landscape. This segment deals with how we... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Last Thursday, the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab played host to Scott McCloud, the comics theorist, creator, entrepreneur, activist, and visionary, who traced for us the progression of his thinking about comics as a medium --... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

In Convergence Culture, I included a sidebar about the remarkable fan fiction produced by Mario Lanza. Lanza is a fan who gets to consult with and often receive fan letters from the characters who populate his stories. Lanza writes fan... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

I am always fascinated when some bit of bottom-up generated "content" starts to get momentum and gain greater public visibility. This past few weeks, I have been observing a ground-swell of interest in a Star Trek fan video set to... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

For those of you who are living in or around the Boston area, I wanted to flag two events next week that will be hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and will be free and open to the public. The... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Throughout the fall term, I am going to be sharing with readers more of the work we have been doing for the MacArthur Foundation on new media literacies, building up to the release of a significant new white paper in... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Last week, I posted about the rapid speed with which television content has moved into new channels of distribution and the degree to which the American public seems to have embraced the ideal of rerun on demand, television for download,... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

Wonderland has Alice’s usual stellar liveblog job, this time of Wonderland: Philip Rosedale at Picnic 06. He says a lot of stuff that people following Second Life already know, but here’s some stats he shared:

• Today in Second Life people are spending close to 7m dollars in mostly digital goods and services per month
• 19,000 landowners
• 80 sq miles, about as big as Amsterdam
• 20 million objects
• 20 terabytes of user created content
• 13 teraflops of simulation
• 3500 server machines
• median age is over 30
• about half is international and half is USA
• Recently the international figure has been accelerating rapidly
• almost gender balanced, early adopters but not necessarily a programmer or technologists
• 36% of signups are women
• women use Second Life so much more than men do, to the degree that 44% of the usage hours are by women
• The majority of people doesn’t get through the first 4 hour learning curve; but once they’re through, they basically never leave

I was amused that Philip also said something that I have said a lot, but put a different twist and emphasis on it:

In a lot of ways, Second Life works a lot like the internet of 1995. The internet was a place where everyone was free to make their own stuff.

The experimental and quite different MMO Seed is closing its doors.

This is a real shame, as Seed had an aesthetic that was quite different from anything else currently out there. With a cel-shaded comic book look, and a game system heavily premised on non-combat roles and ongoing procedural narratives per character, Seed was definitely outside of the mainstream, but was shooting for mainstream-level production values.

Another one for the timeline, I suppose.

Marvel teams up with Cryptic to make a Marvel Universe massively-multiplayer game.

Next interesting question: just reskin City of Heroes/Villains with Marvel Universe content? Design a whole new game? Just make it another major expansion? (City of Heroes/Villains/Marvel Characters)?

I dibs Galactus!

Yes, a respected academic journal with an issue devoted entirely to that one game. Who would possibly publish in such a rag? Err, a whole bunch of us, apparently. You will find articles on player stats, machinima and guild dynamics, to name a few.

Journal link here, and abstracts below the fold.

Building an MMO With Mass Appeal A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft

Nicolas Ducheneaut

Nick Yee

Eric Nickell

Robert J. Moore

Palo Alto Research Center

World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most popular massively multiplayer games (MMOs) to date, with more than 6 million subscribers worldwide. This article uses data collected over 8 months with automated "bots" to explore how WoW functions as a game. The focus is on metrics reflecting a player’s gaming experience: how long they play, the classes and races they prefer, and so on. The authors then discuss why and how players remain committed to this game, how WoW’s design partitions players into groups with varying backgrounds and aspirations, and finally how players "consume" the game’s content, with a particular focus on the endgame at Level 60 and the impact of player-versus-player-combat. The data illustrate how WoW refined a formula inherited from preceding MMOs. In several places, it also raises questions about WoW’s future growth and more generally about the ability of MMOs to evolve beyond their familiar template.

Does WoW Change Everything? How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause

T. L. Taylor

IT University of Copenhagen

Rather than simply identifying "emergence" as a prime property of massively multiplayer online game life, a better understanding of the complex nature of player-produced culture is needed. Life in game worlds is not exempt from forms of player-based regulation and control. Drawing on ethnographic and interview work within World of Warcraft, the author undertakes initial inquiries on this subject by looking at three areas: nationalism, age, and surveillance. This case study shows systems of stratification and control can arise from the bottom up and be implemented in not only everyday play culture but even player-produced modifications to the game system itself. Due to the ways these systems may simultaneously facilitate play, there is often an ambivalent dynamic at work. This piece also prompts some methodological considerations. By discussing field site choice, the author argues that context is of utmost importance and needs to be more thoughtfully foregrounded within game studies.

From Tree House to Barracks The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft

Dmitri Williams

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Nicolas Ducheneaut

Palo Alto Research Center

Li Xiong

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Yuanyuan Zhang

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Nick Yee

Stanford University/Palo Alto Research Center

Eric Nickell

Palo Alto Research Center

A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions.

Storyline, Dance/Music, or PvP? Game Movies and Community Players in World of Warcraft

Henry Lowood

Stanford University

Player-created game movies have been an outlet for creative expression by World of Warcraft (WoW) players since the beta version of the game. The proliferation of players, clans, Web sites, and community forums for creating, consuming, and commenting on WoW movies is remarkable. Linking multiplayer game communities and the making of animated movies is not unprecedented. It has been a characteristic of machinima for more than a decade. In this article however, the author hopes to show that the context, content, and consumption of game movies based on massively multiplayer games raises new questions about contributions game-based performances make to player communities. The author connects the brief history of WoW movies to the history of machinima and other game movies, illustrates the variety of impulses behind WoW movies through three quickly recounted examples, and gathers together salient themes around one movie in particular: Tristan Pope's Not Just Another Love Story.

Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft

Tanya Krzywinska

Brunel University

One of the pleasures of playing in the "World" of Warcraft is becoming part of its pervasive mythology. This article argues that to understand the game’s formal, aesthetic, and structural specificity, its pleasures and potential meanings, it is essential to investigate how the mythic functions. The author shows that the mythic plays a primary role in making a consistent fantasy world in terms of game play, morality, culture, time, and environment. It provides a rationale for players’ actions, as well as the logic that under- pins the stylistic profile of the game, its objects, tasks, and characters. In terms of the "cultural" environments of the game, the presence of a coherent and extensive myth scheme is core to the way differences and conflicts between races are organized. And, as a form of intertextual resonance, its mythology furnishes the game with a "thickness" of meaning that promotes, for players, a sense of mythological being as well as encouraging an in-depth textual engagement.

WoW is the New MUD Social Gaming from Text to Video

Torill Elvira Mortensen

Volda College, Norway

With the immense popularity of massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), other media as well as game research have discovered gaming as a topic of discussion and study. These discussions, however, tend to ignore the history of both games and of game studies. This article addresses the connections between one of the old and, today, obscure forms of using computers for multiplayer gaming—the text-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)—and the current, highly visible and massively used graphic interface game World of Warcraft. These connections range from player style through game-play options to social interaction and player-controlled social modifiers within both types of games. The comparison is based on play, observation, and interviews with players in MUDs and in WoW.

Rob Ellis writes,

10 years ago today I drove the crew up to CompUSA to find our game sitting behind a pole… on store shelves! =) First to hit 10… WOO HOO!