Steven Levy (author of such seminal tech books as Crypto, Hackers, and Insanely Great) has written a fantastic long piece for Newsweek about World of Warcraft. Prepatory to the piece, Levy spent time as an embedded reporter in the notorious We Know guild run by Joi Ito, and caught a side of the game we don't often see in reportage on the phenomenon:
Though WOW is a fantasy world, the interaction between guilds and individuals relies on human choices and morals. The first thing one does when joining the game is to choose an avatar from one of eight "races," split between two factions: the human-looking Alliance and the more bestial Horde. Edward Castronova (Level 42, Priest), an Indiana U professor and author of "Synthetic Worlds," once roiled the WOW community by a blog posting entitled "The Horde Is Evil," in which he charged that only the antisocial at heart would pick that darker side. Castronova believes that if someone behaves badly in the game–an example would be the WOW equivalent of spree killing, where someone ganks a character of a much lower level, just for the hell of it–that person should be judged harshly in the real world as well.
Another example of questionable behavior is viewable in a video that more than 80,000 people have accessed on YouTube. When one guild member died (in real life, not Azeroth), his grieving friends decided to hold a funeral for him inside the game. The solemn affair was disrupted when a rival guild burst upon the unarmed mourners and slaughtered them mercilessly. "It's unfortunate that someone would do that to people trying to honor one of their guild members," says Mike Morhaime, Blizzard's president. Another event that bothered Blizzard's management was an in-game protest march, when hundreds of naked Gnomes gathered to call for more powers.
(via Joi Ito)
