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The rise of virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Everquest) has prompted new questions about the status of games in a digital age. Thomas Malaby’s research at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, suggests that game design and game development practice are becoming a key part of how some high tech companies operate. Instead of relying on top-down and procedural decision-making, these organizations contrive complex and game-like systems that promise to generate legitimate decisions from the ground upBut there are ideological commitments behind these efforts, with their roots in post-WWII American ideas about technology, authority, and they include even a rather peculiar notion of what being human is all about. In this transformation of the workplace – and our online experience – the human is imagined as a gamer of a particular kind. Malaby considers what this way of thinking about the human, one that saturates many of the institutions currently architecting digital society, tells us about the changing status of technology, creativity, and authority for a digital age.
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Making Virtual Worlds: Games and the Human for a Digital Age
IDEA2009 Toronto
Thomas Malaby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Virtual Worlds
World of Warcraft
Second Life
Photo by Shane Willis
“I was always struck by the expressive and, not so much societal elements…I didn’t go in feeling like we’re going to make people’s lives better. But I did go into it feeling like none of it was interesting unless there were a lot of people involved.”
- Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Lab
Playing and Making the World
(pre-D7UX ;) )
Norbert Wiener & Socio-Technical Systems
Stewart Brand & The Whole Earth Catalog
Ken Kesey & The Merry Pranksters
Games, Mastery, & Complex Systems
Homo Ludens - Man the Player
Homo Fabricans - Man the Maker
Homo Creans - Man the Creator
Homo Creans - Man the Creator _________________
Homo Fabricans - Man the Maker Homo Ludens - Man the Player
Designer/Developer _________________
Player/Users/Content Creators
Constant and his New Babylon -- http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/constant.html
Thomas Malaby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
[email protected] www.uwm.edu/~malaby
Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (June 2009, Cornell University Press)
