dispatches from the new world of work

Cool Friend: Castronova

Edward Castronova is the author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Adding him to our Cool Friends brings us back to this suject. We first talked about gaming culture with J.C. Herz in December, 2000. Castronova has a more scholarly approach to the topic, but the message is the same. The worlds you enter by playing are complex; it takes time to learn your role among the many other players—potentially millions. This makes the online gaming experience unique among games you can play. Read Castronova's Cool Friends interview here.

Cathy Mosca posted this on 12/21/05.

Comments

The, to me, really fascinating thing about the online games, especially Warcraft, is that there are organizations called guilds. And guild leaders need to work with a group of 100+ people to select 40 from those available to accomplish some pretty complex goals that require everyone to execute their piece of work properly as part of an overall team.

Leading guilds also requires a lot of insight into group dynamics, motivation and reward and all the other things that leaders have to do IRL.

Since I lead for a living, I prefer to not lead guilds, but I really wonder if our next generation of leaders is currently training in the Molten Core.

And I see Edward forgot about the Horde when he talked about identity. He only mentioned the Alliance races, not the Horde ones - Orc, Trolls, Forsaken and Tauren.

Posted by Chris Bickford at December 21, 2005 11:02 AM

Right, so much of what our kids do as "play" is extremely sophisticated activity. Unlike our parents, they won't have trouble programming their home entertainment equipment. Thanks for starting off the discussion.

Posted by cathy at December 21, 2005 2:18 PM