Joi Ito Presentation: Why I Love WoW (World of Warcraft) (SXSW)

This one happened off the record as part of the ScreenBurn session.  Joi Ito is VP of International and mobility for Technorati and Chairman of Six Apart Japan.  He is also on the board of Creative Commons.  Here is a link to his CV.  But Joi was not at the ScreenBurn track to talk about these experiences.  He was there to talk about World of Warcraft, an interactive networked video game.  Now, I’m not a gamer (if I were one, I would most certainly fail to properly balance life reality with virtual reality) so I can’t pretend to summarize much of what was said about the game or the various cyber groupings
that occur among WoW players.  (Someone PLEASE add some additional info in the comments to fill out this section of the story for me).  But Joi is a SERIOUS gamer.  He is the leader of a guild within World of Warcraft, and as such, he constantly has his guild members (real people who are also gamers and are members of his guild within the game) available via conference call so that he can call in and check up on recent events or order raids on other guilds.  Joi views this cyber-reality as a case study of start-up culture: he is essentially running a small business within the game albeit with alternate laws and societal norms.  But leadership, organizational strategy, motivation and competitive tactics matter just as much when dealing with people in a cyberworld than they do in reality.  And for those who think that this is just strange and weird, look at how corporate marketers are already jumping all over MySpace.com (here’s the myspace page for the Honda Element and an article about the madness), think about the heyday they can eventually have creating virtual marketing campaigns by getting people to user their products virtually.  To me, it seems to be an inevitability that this will happen…but I suppose it might take longer for Honda to come around to want to promote having their cars driven by a bunch of orcs who eat sheep (if orcs don’t eat sheep, again, please correct me below…)

Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, WoW, gaming, Warcraft

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