Jack Weinberg is often attributed as the source of "we don't trust anybody over 30 (1965, fn1)." Clive Thompson introduces a piece ("Say Everything", Emily Nussbaum) from the current issue of New York magazine claiming "(t)oday's social technologies are creating the biggest generation gap since rock and roll -- with younger people having radically different ideas than their parents about what's public and what's private." 30? As was written, "at 26, Kitty is herself an old lady, in Internet terms."
What are the virtual world implications?
A glib line of reasoning might start like this:
1.) Your mother plays MMOs
2.) Is your father's MMO your MMO?
Superficially, we could say, yes, while the technical/design evolutionary path of the MMO may seem predictable, especially from hindsight, the user impact at every juncture is "non-linear". So for example, the addition of integrated voice (or pick your feature) has a dramatic new effect. Thus, by this reasoning, it will cease to be your mother's MMO.
However, a more subtle view in tune with Emily's thesis starts with dmx's comment made in Life of Game: (m)aybe it would be more appropriate to say 'Its just a performance'. Your MMO (if you are under 26) may be your father's MMO, but how you interact with it, with your friends in and out of it, is not how your mother or father would do. In other words, the (cell-)phone, the Internet, the MMO are the means but not the ends to the under 30, err, 26 experience.
Key to this view is the difference in how younger users might interact with each other in a new hybridization of reality -mixing the virtual and meatspace. Clive wrote "young people have adapted to the idea that information about their personal life is now porous, and not always under their control. For their generation, privacy's dead -- so they're making the best of it", Emily observes more deeply:
...In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn ...
...Since their early adolescence, they've learned to modulate their voice to address a set of listeners that may shrink or expand at any time: talking to one friend via instant message (who could cut-and-paste the transcript), addressing an e-mail distribution list (archived and accessible years later), arguing with someone on a posting board (anonymous, semi-anonymous, then linked to by a snarky blog). It's a form of communication that requires a person to be constantly aware that anything you say can and will be used against you, but somehow not to mind.
In comment Clive perhaps frames the issue (in comment to his post) for here best:
Being 38 years old, I know a lot of folks in their 30s and 40s who are hardcore users of social software, for sure. But there's undeniably a qualitative difference in the way someone of my age uses this stuff, and someone who's 19 does, because someone who's 19 does not even really remember a time when these technologies weren't around.
I'm reminded of Clive's point constantly.
Recently, for example, I felt compelled to remove myself from an online player group because of a comfort they had to rely on Ventrilo for the majority of online communications. To my 40s+ yo view of the world, this seems excessive. Sure, many gameplay situations, e.g. combat, require voice coordination, and it is gold then. However I do have a discomfort with the idea of having to commit to hours of low-tempo gameplay over VoIP where chit-chat is the only purpose. The ebbing away of the distinction between the virtual and the real identity/experience feels like a loss: I don't want to hear their toilets flushing, nor do I want to have to remember to shut off my mic when my kids start fighting.
It is perhaps a generational moment, and I hear Peter (fn2): This is reality; deal with it.
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fn1. From Bartleby.com: "JACK WEINBERG, twenty-four year old leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, California, interview with San Francisco Chronicle reporter, c. 1965. "
fn2. Reference Peter Ludlow's quote cited in Life of game: This is reality; deal with it.
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