I'm in the process of reading TL Taylor's excellent new book Play Between Worlds, which got me to thinking a bit about the relationship between "virtual" and "real" social connections. Taylor (at least in the first section of the book) talks about the extent to which social relationships begin to extend from in-game to real life, and this type of social spillover has been a constant theme in discussions of virtual life for quite some time (see, for example, Howard Rheingold's 15-year-old The Virtual Community).
Lately, however, I've seen something different happening in the context of virtual worlds and MMORPGs. The social tide isn't moving from the virtual to the real...it's going the other way. Increasingly people are starting to play games like World of Warcraft, or visit worlds like Second Life, because friends and colleagues in the real world are inviting them into that space.
I started playing World of Warcraft in December because a friend and colleague had encouraged me to join his guild--and a big part of the appeal was being able to interact with him and with other real-world friends and colleagues. My kids then started playing WoW because I was there, and because my friends and I were in a position to be able to help them navigate the game and fund their early explorations.
Not long after I started playing WoW, however, the convergence of my real-world and virtual social networks began to present some challenges for me. What do you do, for example, when a professional colleague IMs you at work to tell you that your teenage son is ninja-ing loot in an instance and could you please log in and tell him to stop? (Yes, you're laughing, I know. But I wasn't, at the time.) It was an indication of how these virtual contexts are beginning to affect real-world social ties and boundaries--sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
Recent discussions of WoW being the "new golf," are another indication of the shift that's taking place. And I think there are implications here for virtual world and MMORPG designers and marketers. The days of "if you build it, they will come" are going away, and the importance of seeding your virtual space with real people who will attract their friends and colleagues is growing. Making it easy for groups that exist in one context to re-form in another virtual space will matter. Creating more sophisticated tools for handling group relationships and communication "in world" will matter, as well. And finding ways to bridge the communication gaps between the virtual and real will be important--from presence indicators that we can embed on our blogs, to IM that reaches both inside and outside of virtual contexts.
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