timothygreig.com » Virtual Lives - MMOs and the internet

— I'm Timothy. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, and I work for Victoria University's Architecture & Design Library. This is my personal journal. You'll find I'm interested in librarianship, game design, information architecture, and some other stuff. Updates? — Try the RSS.

Virtual Lives - MMOs and the internet



Welcome to this ‘live page’ for my lecture: Virtual Lives - MMOs and the Internet. In particular the lecture will look at the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game World of Warcraft and videos made by gamers in response to their experiences in the game. Two videos will be shown in the course of the presentation. The first is "World of Warcraft is a Feeling", a snippet from PurePwnage, a kind of mock-umentary series about the life of a ‘pro gamer‘. Later on we will look at the Serenity Now Guild’s Funeral PvP video. This page is designed as a reference point to be used both while the lecture is in progress, and also as something you may want to refer back to later. Starting from this page you may use the discussion chat, browse links, view blog posts, and watch videos. More static content most pertinent to this lecture can be found higher up the page, while relevant and equally interesting items can be found lower down the page.


Chatting with Gabbly "Gabbly" is an application "that enables people to instantly connect and collaborate around any content, topic or interest". Clicking on the image will insert http://gabbly.com/ in front of the URL for this page which will load a chat window that you can use to talk with other people viewing this page. You can use Gabbly to talk about the lecture while it is in progress! An extended transcript of this lecture can be found on Writely, as I used this application to prepare! My powerpoint is also available as a pdf document.	Convergence Culture and Dr. Henry Jenkins MIT’s Henry Jenkins has developed a theory he calls "Convergence Culture". It can be applied to explore changing practices among media producers and audiences. Jenkins’ personal website has a good article about media convergence, and there have been several speaking engagements and podcasts where he has elaborated on his theory. Unfortunately, Jenkins’ book, Convergence Culture, has not yet been been published.

Follow the links below to resources about Massively Multiplayer Online Games Wikipedia entries for Virtual Worlds, MMOs, and MMORPGs. Psychology doctoral student Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project an online-based study of MMORPGs. Of particular interest might be Yee’s models of player motivations as well as images collected from the community showing game events. The Daedalus Gateway also gives a good introduction to Yee’s studies, and highlights the scope of his work.	Pure Pwnage Produced by a group of gamers from Canada, this is a satirical documentary of sorts following the life of Jeremy, a ‘pro-gamer’. Pure Pwnage has it’s own wikipedia entry PurePwnage has it’s own wikipedia entry. It is especially interesting to that Pure Pwnage has recently begun producing an online comic to compliment the video series. Machinima and Gamer Videos One of the best resources for gamer videos about World of Warcraft is Warcraft Movies.com Blizzard’s Community Spotlight news posts regularly highlight new videos made by gamers about World of Warcraft.


Below you’ll find link feeds from my Google Feed Reader and hyperlinks from my del.icio.us bookmarks that I’ve tagged with "soci350vl". I hope to keep updating these as time goes on and I spot other websites and blogs that I think relate to this lecture. These "Link Rolls" only show the most recent of these tagged items, so they’re not a definitive guide to all that’s out there - just an interesting starting point. You might enjoy exploring the online applications for yourself in more detail and the "soci350vl" tag will be a useful place to begin. Use del.icio.us! If you want to start a del.icio.us account of your own, tagging items with "soci350vl" will make those items appear on a list of bookmarks that everyone can visit. What’s more, you can also add an RSS feed of this list to a feed reader and recieve regular updates when new bookmarks are posted. It might be a good way for the class to keep eachother updated with interesting web-links. I’ve added the RSS feed to my Google Feed Reader, so any items you do add should also begin to appear on this page too!