Posts with tag occupy-greg-street

In early 2009 I wrote about The Ghostcrawler Experiment. In it I asked the question if Greg Street's (aka Ghostcrawler's) unique communication has helped or hindered World of Warcraft. Today, five years later, he departs from Blizzard as their Lead Systems Designer amongst the cheers and jeers of the community. Now is a good time to revisit the question as the experiment conclude: was Ghostcrawler's presence good or bad?

It's my contention that overall his presence has helped not only World of Warcraft succeed but has also evolved the level of discourse in the industry. Prior to Ghostcrawler's prolific writing, developer communication was often scant for AAA titles. There'd be the canned press interviews (notice that gaming press interviews are almost always the same), the short blog or video post saying nothing revolutionary and just acting as a marketing tool, and a series of social media interactions that only showed off a few new graphics.

While Ghostcrawler was not the first game designer to provide an abnormal level of insight behind the scenes, he is the largest and most public. The stage given to him was gigantic, and he took control of it unlike few people could. Ghostcrawler's words, quite literally, reached more people than the nightly news some days. Tens of millions tune into the Warcraft media sites for BlizzCon, and he was front and center with the nerfing of paladins.

Greg Street, better known as Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer on World of Warcraft), is at the center of a vast game designer conspiracy ruining the in-game lives of millions of players. Or so goes the popular theory espoused by the exploding Twitter hashtag #OccupyGregStreet spoofing (what else?) the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As Mike Sacco explained in WoW Insider's back room chat, the joke originated from a conversation he'd had at BlizzCon with Narci (@druidis4fite) of Flavor Text, and as far as I can tell, the first tweets are from Narci and @malgrim on the con's second day. WoW Insider's first tweet with the hashtag went live around 1:00 this morning. Things snowballed from there and reached new levels of hilarity when the official World of Warcraft Twitter account (@warcraft) got in on the joke.