tl;dr:
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the internet world runs parallel to the physical world, yet is a universe itself distinct. most people haven’t fully realized this implications of this yet.
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wow is not precisely a social experiment, but as the last major mover in a now-stagnant MMORPG genre, blizzard has enjoyed 15 years of monopoly in creating and maintaining the major VR-simulated environ – with full access to azeroth-wide data, (real-time) database of player behavior, and analytics in the back-end
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by definition, MMORPGs aim for an immersive and simulative environment, brought to life through emergent player behavior (not unlike similar blockbuster MMO titles like Facebook and Twitter). it is arguable wow is the largest visual-based virtual reality in existence, as opposed to much larger, identity-based platforms that are f2p like social networks
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the unique attributes of wow – multi-million userbase; virtual ~sandbox with tight developer I/O controls; digital physics that allow emergent behavior like corrupted blood – allow researchers to get a first-approximation of how virtual reality universes operate and, importantly, how humans change and modify themselves to interface with digital worlds
HISTORY
it is somewhat coincidental that wow and facebook (kings of MMO) both launched in 2004: the transition from web 1.0 to 2.0 inherited the public’s scepticism of post-dotcom bust internet, with few survivors (notably 1998’s google and 1995’s amazon - who now owns twitch, itself a blockbuster virtual reality). strong public scepticism = asymmetric opportunity to create major platforms on the new cyberspace frontier
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
– Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, speaking in 1998
the internet provided the rigid protocol foundation to allow new ‘virtual reality’ environments to be built upon it, leading to failed experiments like friendster/myspace and winners like blogs, facebook, chatrooms/usenet/IRC, 100s of multiplayer videogame universes, etc.
william gibson called cyberspace a ‘collective hallucination’ in his 1984 book-- appropriate, given the earliest environments (usenet, IRC) let other people put their words/thoughts onto your CRT screen, to cryptic/magical effect
broadband internet access was ramping up heavily US-wide, which matured quickly in the next 2 years (2006) to finally allow streaming video to emerge (youtube/netflix). yet, the internet lacked user critical mass, and beige pc boxes with pentium 4s were still strictly the domain of nerds.
the early survivors, coupled with newer giants, have now clearly been ‘eating’ much of the old world, but in 2004 nobody took the internet seriously. even fewer people took it seriously in 1991, when the www protocol was invented
apple introduced a working mobile computer (not a phone) in 2007 that could reasonably interface with the internet, and all the major ‘virtual reality’ platforms began building around this paradigm shift (computers in every human’s pocket) to get people online (digital frontier goldrush).
what was just 58 million facebook users in dec 2007 became >2 billion by june 2016 (side note: facebook is likely the best proxy indicator for internet growth.)
the internet became cool, the computer became cool, and now we have billions of people connected in dozens of disparate, coarse, first-gen virtual reality environments
LOGIC
the logic of the internet allows person-to-person communication, cooperation, data transfer, and now value transfer – across borders and above gatekeepers[0]
this can be words, pictures, videos, memes (an incredibly underrated phenomena), games, business database entries, a network of taxi cabs, users in a twitch streamer’s chatroom, …
these attributes can work in a distributed, uncontrolled fashion (rules without rulers anarchy) or in central-planning fashion. the pendulum oscillates: early internet was distributed (www hyperlinks as bridges between vistas), got ate up by central platforms with a superior user experience and/or free services (google, facebook, youtube, tinder, uber, so on), and now with recent compsci breakthroughs, completely distributed information transfer is now possible (web 3.0)
facebook knows more about genuine human psychology than every psychology department at every university combined.
facebook is, more or less, a big database of databases:
- a database of your friends,
- a database of your status updates,
- a database of the connections between user’s friends (graph)
we get a peek into our own profile’s database, but not everyone else’s – which is why facebook has unprecedented power over much of the world. amazon, google, blizzard is the same way. the more data they get, the more powerful they become. blizzard is unique in that their virtual reality has a visual-based world with movement and physics, and their developers can pull direct data/insights from this living world of emergent human behavior
emergent human behavior? why is this important? in many modern social ‘sciences’, which have been politicized and have a demonstrable replication crisis, theory is quickly pawned as truth, only to be found useless 5 years later. on the digital frontier, with platforms having real-time back-end access to how humans actually behave, theory takes a backseat to observable, direct cause and effect in human behavior.
in theory, theory=practice. in practice, theory and practice are not the same. facebook knows more about genuine human psychology than every psychology department at every university combined. blizzard, accordingly, should be at least in the same ballpark
wow, for social experimental reasons, can be thought of similarly:
- a database of players,
- a database of realID connections between players,
- a database of each server’s general and trade chats,
- a visual-based virtual reality world bound by VR physics,
- etc.
how do these databases of social interaction play out as the internet evolves? we shall see…
[0] gatekeepers like hollywood directors, television producers, publishing houses, newspapers editors, governments… basically the cabal of power-hungry turbonerd elites who held reigns over public opinion pre-Internet. if you wanted to “get the word out” about something, good luck getting your ‘letter to the editor’ published. try going door to door maybe?