Posts with tag newsweek

Short and sweet this week. Okay, maybe the space is more grotty than sweet, but I'll let submitter Charlie explain:

You guys seem to be featuring really neat and nice set-ups, so I thought I'd show you what most WoW player's desks look like! In order from left to right: Latest Newsweek, bottle of water, Bourne Supremacy, LOTR The Two Towers (Extended), a Hotpocket, an old Canon AE-1 (for when I do shoot film), Klipsch speakers (eh, they're ok, field is a little narrow), Apple 20" Cinema Display, iPod Mini (it's there, trust me), 90+ year old negatives from my grandmother that I need to take into work to restore (brown envelope), BC mouse pad, USB multi-card reader I ninja'd from work, RAZR, Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with 2GB of RAM, ATi Radeon 9600 with 128MB of DDR (eh, need to upgrade), old Joystick from when I used to play flight sims all night long, and my Ventrilo headset.

Remember to send your submissions in to our Reader WoWspace address, along with a couple of good photos of your space.

This Newsweek article -- yet another mainstream look at this strange concept called World of Warcraft -- unexpectedly asks a very interesting question. Is WoW a game? Sadly, the article devotes most of its time to explaining the concept of WoW to an outside audience, rather than getting stuck into a discussion of virtual worlds, their categorisation, and their future.

It's often been said that WoW can be more like a job than a hobby; the regular hours, the repetitive tasks, the camaraderie, the rewards. The question asked by the Newsweek piece, however, has a different angle from the old "work vs play" debate. Instead, it asks -- is this the future? Are WoW's immersiveness, its ability to sneak into lives, its vast popularity all indicators of what virtual worlds in the future will hold? I think so.

'Serious' virtual worlds could easily take lessons from WoW on how to be fun, but while WoW may be exemplary with regards to current MMO design, it's still very much rooted in the 'entertainment' sphere -- future developments away from gaming and towards everyday pervasive virtual worlds have to cater for the seven million WoW-heads, and will be more easily received as a result.

The most important question of all, though, is: when we live and work in the Matrix, will there still be night elves called Légolass?

[Thanks, Dave]