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Content Tagged with second-life + world-of-warcraft

There are an unprecedented number of new online ventures seeking to create user based software, but among these hundreds of offerings there is a split in the core design: Should users run the show?

The design of Second Life highlights this model. The creators of Second Life, Linden Labs, seek to be nothing more than platform developers who rent servers to people who want to play on their platform. This means that all content in the second life world is created by users, in a largely unregulated way. Because there is no rules or purpose to using Second Life, Second Life has become a chaotic and risqué collection of people interacting in what is essentially a giant avatar based chat room.

The other side of this model is World of Warcraft. In WoW, everything in the world is created by Blizzard developers and artists. The experience is scripted and polished, to a perfection that has been the signature of Blizzard products since the first Warcraft was released in 1994. These is not an ounce of content in WoW that wasn’t created by Blizzard, user interface mods aside. Because Warcraft sticks so closely to focusing on a great game experience, Warcraft is an experience much like Disneyland – thoughtfully crafted rides, fun for the whole family, carefully tended and managed to help avoid the chaos people usually bring along with them.

Other services pretty much fall into one of these two models.

This model might suggest that the two models are different segments, but looking closely at the development of all of these successful sites suggests reverse entropy: embracing chaos is not a sustainable way to run a site: the future model for mature social software seems to be Disneyland / World of Warcraft.

As usual, Clay Shirky wrote a great paper on this and way before I even thought about it, in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

The problem is that in unmanaged communities, there’s a power vacuum and eventually someone ends up directing it, typically either spammers or high schoolers with the time and inclination to take over, it’s often a combination of the two. Clay is not the first person to write about this issue.

For a while chaos works quite well. Digg has rode the wave of “user controlled” to the top, all the while introducing algorithmic limits to individual power as well as managing things editorially for quality control. Today’s Digg, with bans on top users to moderate the community as well as algorithmic limitations on vote efficacy is very different from the early Digg versions with a simple set number of votes required to promote a story and a small but loyal following that kept things in line.

del.icio.us manages their chaos as well through putting limits on user interactivity. Joshua Schachter has been quoted on many occasions that he does not want to build a community, but rather a social tool – because of the management problems community brings.

A good example of the promise of chaos and the problems it brings can be seen in a recent patch to World of Warcraft the other day. Although Warcraft is mostly static with a window dressing war that doesn’t change, for holidays and other occasions Blizzard will introduce a seasonal patch with goodies for the time of year.

For Christmas (Winterveil) this year Blizzard introduced reindeer, fruitcake, Father “Winterveil”, and throwable snowballs. Snowball fights abounded. But there was a problem. Players hit with snowballs move back. In Warcraft, only members of the opposing side are supposed to be able to attack each other, but suddenly there was a new game called “snowball your team mates off of the cliff”. Pretty soon the forums exploded with people complaining about their fun being ruined by mean kids with snowballs. Quickly, Blizzard issued a hotfix to end the snowball fights: no more snowball fights with your friends.

This small change highlights the process that all of these social sites go through. Whether it’s Google YouTube turning to censoring comments or it’s del.icio.us blocking my private bookmarking service, control over the community is taken away from the users and put in the hands of the host.

This is not the wrong decision. The impulse is to say Warcraft should have let the snowball fights go on. But World of Warcraft is a great game, a fun game and safe for kids to play, and it’s because of a thousand decisions like this: it’s a constant battle to keep it that way. Disneyland might not be a very interesting place, but I liked it when I was a kid and they have to cope with an enormous scale of visitors, offering a consistent and satisfying experience to each paying customer. The alternative is Second Life, with 1/3 of its player economy devoted to pornography, and an explosive item cloning issue, it’s not something I’d buy someone for Christmas.

There’s a lot to be said for a controlled experience. In SWiK we see spam every single day. People are trying to take control over our pages, abusing our open system. The temptation will always be to close it, to require registration to edit, to put up captchas and email verification and other lockouts. And it’s not a bad impulse. The bad impulse is to stop innovating in the face of chaos. I’m glad Blizzard tried the snowballs, and I’m glad they took them out quickly. The key is the focus on the experience. For experiments and new services, chaos works well and is a lot more interesting, but as things mature people want something that just works rather than something that has promise and flexibility.