Expanding scope

In class recently, my professor said that he thought the journalism potential of virtual worlds, like World of Warcraft was largely unexplored. Even though Reuters and NPR’s Talk of the Nation have set up shop in Second Life, I’m intrigued by the idea of news delivery in other game spaces.

Last week, Marketplace covered a growing trend of businesses abandoning their Second Life shops. Mark Hughes, a marketing expert they interviewed, had some harsh words about the venue’s potential:

The people in Second Life, they aren’t worth reaching. It’s just a weird place. It’s never gonna catch on. It’s a fad, not a fashion at all.

I hate to say that I’ve felt the same way about that particular virtual world. For all that’s been written about Second Life and for all the amazing potential of an experience that lets users create the majority of the content, I’ve always felt uncomfortable there. It’s a niche group of people.

So, are online experiences a fad or just Second Life in particular? I lean toward the latter and I think it might be worthwhile to explore other online experiences.

While World of Warcraft probably takes the lead in stories about game adiction, it’s drawn in a fairly widespread audience, recently announcing that it has grown past the 10 million mark (an achievement Second Life also shares, though the active user base is said to be around 500,000). Completely anecdotal, but I can’t name a person I know that plays Second Life. I don’t have enough fingers to count WoW acquaintances on both hands.

WoW, however, is a very locked down experience compared to Second Life and many of its Massively Multiplayer compatriates are similar. They aren’t sandboxes that allow endless user creation. You may get to pick out your avatar’s hair and enjoy a limited selection of what they wear, but overall the designers control the content. So, the approach for the journalist wanting to use WoW as a venue will need to be much more creative. One can’t go in and build a virtual news desk. One must work with tools that were only designed for very specific gameplaying purposes.

This is a good challenge though and one I want to dive into more on this blog.