What the game does is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think [massively multiplayer online games] will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.

(Photo by Brian Solis)

You don't need to be able to talk gold and swords to understand that WoW, as it's abbreviated, is a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" — which means that it's a group timewaster through which people bond. (A lot of people: The game, for which Blizzard charges a monthly subscription fee, has 11 million subscribers.)

Sort of like golf! Venture capitalist Joi Ito has called World of Warcraft "the new golf," the social glue connecting a new generation of Silicon Valley businessmen. True enough, I suppose, for the overpaid, underemployed investor class. But for the people who are trying to pick up the slack for coworkers who overdid it on a raid last night, here's what World of Warcraft really is: the new binge drinking.

“(The) Chinese have invented some interesting ways to play with the in-game economy (not the real world economy). Ways that I have not observed here in two years of studying ‘World of Warcraft.’

“Chinese players are more attuned to the aesthetics of the game. At least they mention them more in interviews. They talked more about color schemes, animations, architecture, and so on more than American players.

“There seem to be fewer female players of ‘World of Warcraft’ in China. On the order of 20 percent here and 10 percent there.

“Here and in Europe and Australia/New Zealand people play with parents and even grandparents. Not in China. The older generation dislikes video games. People here play with brothers and sisters. But in China people don’t have brothers and sisters for the most part, so friend relationships are very important.

(Image by Morgan Sherwood)

(Photo by Stacina)

If, that is, they tweak the formula. In the first show, Albrecht and friends run through an "instance," or dungeon quest, that's far too easy for their characters — the idea is to offer tips and tricks for some of the harder parts of the end of the game. The most entertaining parts are watching them bicker over the various pieces of treasure won when defeating difficult monsters in the game. While the show has undeniable appeal to the inevitable cross-over between WoW players and Diggnation viewers, the testosterone level is pretty high even for that audience. A guest appearance by the likes of The Guild's Felicia Day would do wonders to broaden the appeal of the show a bit.

11. YouTube

At risk: Daredevils, fictional characters
Case 1: While trying to perform a stunt for YouTube, four teens crashed their Ford Explorer, injuring three and killing one. No details on how awesome the clip would have been, but hopefully it'd be more exciting than "ghost riding," the 2005-07 fad of rolling an idling car down the street while dancing beside it. The result of that fad, besides a few lame videos, was two deaths. Other stupid deadly stunts include subway surfing and fake stunts that end up in banner ads.
Case 2: A man who explained on YouTube how to tie a hangman's noose has been accused of inciting suicide. A few days after the news reported it, someone else posted instructions (though this user has posted plenty of other knot-tying videos, and who could hang themselves with the festive purple and yellow rope he uses?).
Case 3: Of course fictional characters die often and violently: Lonelygirl15, Harry Potter, and the radio star.


10. Myspace

At risk: The lonely
Case 1: Remarkably, no charges were filed in the case of the family who carried on a hoax relationship with 13-year-old depression sufferer Megan Meier over MySpace, then "broke up" with her and thus driving her to suicide. But this is only our first glimpse at two themes of Internet-caused deaths: Tragic romance and preying on the lonely.
Case 2: In this case, MySpace technically saved lives. Cops investigated a 12-year-old boy's MySpace death list, warned everyone who was on it, and searched his home. They didn't find weapons and he said he was just fooling around, so he was just charged with juvenile delinquency. Other death threat cases include a dog and another empty threat against high school students. But just to be safe I make my little sister keep a Google alert on her name, cause she''d be the first to go if some trenchcoated freak started shooting up the cool kids in her school.
Case 3: Of course while stupid people may reveal their murder plans on MySpace, they may be inspired by the site too. Heather Kane saw another girl on her boyfriend's profile and hired a hitman to kill her. Good thing she bumped into an undercover cop instead.


9. Facebook

At risk: Anyone who pisses off a muslim
Case 1: A Saudi Arabian father beat and shot his daughter earlier this year for chatting on Facebook. A preacher in the Islamic country called the site a "door to lust;" many Saudi women use aliases on the site and post drawings instead of photos. But there are still plenty of photos of hookups in the Facebook group "Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia."
Case 2: After a Jewish woman in Melbourne rejected a friend offer from one Ibrahim Dirani, he allegedly wrote to her, "I am Hezbollah and I am going to kill you and all of your family — promise you."
Aw,


8. Pornography

At risk: Viewers of extreme or illegal porn and the people who know them
Case 1: It's hard to feel too sorry for those who kill themselves after they're implicated in child porn rings, like these four suicides in 1998 and these six in 2004.
Case 2: Porn doesn't only kill the depraved. The story of Jane Longhurst, an English woman killed by "a man obsessed with violent sexual pornography," was tragic enough to encourage many UK lawmakers to ban extreme porn.


7. Spam

At risk: The terribly gullible
Case 1: Spammers and scammers can easily take your money if you're dumb enough to give them your passwords and financial info. But some Nigerian scams go far beyond online fraud; many scammers lure their victims to Nigeria to continue paying money in person; fifteen victims were killed after they got suspicious.


6. Blogging

At risk: Those already at risk of dying
Case 1: There's a trick to making listicles like this: Put the weakest item in the middle. Unfortunately the New York Times spent an entire trend piece on the bogus idea of "death by blogging." But Gizmodo editor Brian Lam tells me, "Only bogus to lazy bloggers. I did 75 hours this week and anyone over fifty would die doing that."


5. Ebay

At risk: The already dead
Case 1: Seung-Hui Cho bought empty clips and holsters on Ebay before his Virginia Tech rampage. He got his guns and ammo elsewhere, though Ebay notes that the sale of ammunition on Ebay is legal.
Case 2: Ebay's death profits tend to come from the memorabilia. Celebrity deaths bring predictable results, like sales of Pope tchotchkes and autographed Heath Ledger posters. But Ebay has also hosted auctions for supposed Columbia shuttle pieces, video of insurgents shooting down planes in Iraq, the car used in a murder, and O.J. Simpson's book.


4. Drugs

At risk: Druggies
Case 1: Internet drug sales are ridiculously easy (see "spam" above), so easy that every decent men's magazine did an "I ordered Viagra off the Internet" story by 2005. But that means irresponsible doctors can prescribe dangerous drugs, such as this 2002 case of deadly drugs sold online, or this case of a doctor whose patients sometimes became addicted or were hospitalized, or a 2007 case where a 57-year-old Canadian woman died after taking an illegal sedative she ordered online.


3. Webcams

At risk: Suicides
Case 1: Webcam suicide is one of the darkest modern phenomena, an example of loneliness and despair in a supposed age of connection and hope. Those who have fallen that far and recovered may want to forget it ever happened. Webcammer Stacy Pershall has long insisted that despite reports, she did not try to kill herself on camera in 2001 by overdosing on pills but merely took some Advil "to get a few hours sleep" — on her bathroom floor.
Case 2: While Pershall's viewers worried about her and called the cops to save her, those watching Brandon Vedas in 2003 egged him on. He OD'd on five drugs and died a room away from his unsuspecting mother.
Case 3: A father named Kevin Whitrick hanged himself after the apparent encouragement of people watching his webcam; viewers later said they thought it was a joke, and indeed they'd acted worried after seeing him die. After all, he was in an insult chat room, which brings us to another cause of death:


2. Chat rooms

At risk: Hopeless romantics
Case 1: A man rejected in real life by his chat room lover in 1999 cut his own head off with a chainsaw in her front yard. Enough said.
Case 2: Plenty of innocents have been killed by online predators like the man who killed an altar girl, the Texas A&M killer, and this guy in a rural North Carolina trailer.


1. World of Warcraft

At risk: 10 million players, particularly the already crazy ones
Case 1: World of Warcraft addiction may not necessarily be deadly for the player, but it can be hell on their family life. Of course, Kim Trenor was probably crazy long before she moved cross-country with her 2-year-old to see a guy she met on the game, and definitely before she and Royce Zeigler beat "Baby Grace" to death. But if it weren't for that damned game she never would have met the allegedly abusive Zeigler.
Case 2: WoW isn't the first game to drive addicts mad. At least one Everquest player allegedly shot herself after getting hooked on the game.
Case 3: And of course any time you put a beautiful bit of fantasy in the world, some kid will try to imitate it. Happened with Superman, happened with WoW when a Chinese boy jumped off a 24-story building. His parents sued game maker Blizzard saying he was imitating the game, in which some players like to platform-jump, an activity totally unrelated to actually playing. Again, totally not WoW's fault, but something had to convince that boy he could leap off a tower.

The trailer:

"Rogues Do It From Behind:"

The series is apparently doing well even in this scary new world of amateur porn, falling budgets, and a customer base that refuses to pay money when they can watch everything for free on Megarotic.com. It's expensively produced, and looks surprisingly catchy. I mean it's still not exactly network-ready cinematography, and there's no real swordplay (which would have taken the series from "weirdly good" to "weirdly epic"), but it plays off the Warcraft world so well that, unlike every other porn spoof ever, it actually could appeal to fans of the original. Even if these fans are the sort who jerk off over their headset mics to a dancing orc after a cave raid.

Sex position or World of Warcraft spell? (answers at bottom of page)
1. Cat Form
2. Stargazing
3. Earth Shock
4. Backstab
5. Bull Horn
6. Rainbow Arch
7. Charge
8. Aimed Shot
9. Crushing Spices
10. Clinging Creeper
11. Battle Stance
12. Double-edged Knife

Five LOLcat ways to say no to sex!
1. Abstinent cat is abstinent
2. Iz that time of monf
3. I made you a Viagra, but I eated it.
4. Sumbuddy stole mah fukket
5. DO NOT WANT

Match the Internet people to the sex toy:
1. Star Wars Kid
2. Thriller Prisoners
3. Ask a Ninja
4. Leeroy Jenkins

A. The Python Extra-Large Double Dong
B. Trojan Extended Pleasure with Climax Control
C. Vibrating Silver Bullet
D. Fuzzy nunchucks

(Answer: None. The above people all need the touch of a real woman)

Computer dangers that you could also get from sex
Did you know that some people somewhere are using the Internet instead of having sex? Here's why!

• Chances of back ache, carpal tunnel are just the same
• Google doesn't laugh at questions
• Lower-risk poking
• Less shame after "404 Not Found"
• Finally an activity that lasts longer than two minutes

Answers
Positions: 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12
Spells: 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11

Artwork from Your Lost. Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. Actually, he's having sex right now.

But Virtual World Productions may have a Hollywood edge. Based in LA and backed by LivePlanet, the studio that filmed HBO's Project Greenlight, VWP is wisely hedging its bets. One of its websites, Grid World News, chronicles Second Life, but the other, Azeroth World News, covers happenings in World of Warcraft, the more popular, and profitable, multiplayer online game.

"We're trying to be the uber-media agency that services virtual worlds for information and other things," LivePlanet CEO Larry Tanz told The Hollywood Reporter. "Advertising, classifieds and personals will follow the content — content is just the first foray into it."

A staff of 30 — yes, 30 — journalists is currently churning out riveting stories such as "Honor Among Thieves", a look into the misunderstood life of rogues (a character class in World of Warcraft), and "Now That's a Whopper", which recounts a Second Life fishing trip.

By: Brian Crecente

Wikipedia turned the concept of research and encyclopedias on its head, making readers into writers and the once static text of a encyclopedic tomb into something up-to-the-second timely. And now, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to do the same thing for gaming reference books. Giving game FAQs, walkthroughs and nuanced details a place to live on Wikia.

"Imagine a traditional encyclopedia, that's Wikipedia," Wikipedia founder and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales, 40, told me in a recent interview. "Then think about all of the rest of the library, every other kind of book or work, (Wikia) is basically that. Specialized books."

Wikia was founded in 2004 growing steadily into an online research site home to more than 3,000 wiki communities in 70 languages, the largest of which, by far, is the one dedicated to gaming, Wales said.

"As we've watched the growth of the Wikia, what's fueling that growth is the gaming communities, which we didn't anticipate," he said. "A couple of months ago at our board meeting we discussed this, this is obviously something we haven't recognized going in that is clearly important."

Currently the Gaming Wikia is home to tens of thousands of articles about nearly 500 different games and gaming subjects. The entries range from the mammoth (the World of Warcraft wiki sports more than 31,000 articles and the Halopedia has about 2,500) to the minuscule (the entry for Yohoho is six sentences long).

But Wales is hoping to expand the Gaming Wikia dramatically. This E3 he will be meeting with developers to try and get the word out about the free site and how its community-fueled knowledge base can help promote their games. In return he hopes to get them more involved.

"We want to get known more in the gaming industry," Wales said. "Basically, we want to form relationships there, and see how we can work with the gaming companies to do things like get materials for the communities to be able to work with. We are ad supported so that's also why we want to get to know the companies."

Eventually, Wales hopes that the Gaming Wikia will become a place where entries are created and communities built before a game ships. But he doesn't see his site as competition with the likes of Brady Games or Gamefaqs.

"I'm not sure if we're competition or not," he said. "I think we are more competition for some of those smaller forums. It's like asking if Wikipedia is competition for CNN."

I asked Wales about the in-fighting that can often happen on Wikipedia, sometimes marring entries. (For instance a banned Kotaku reader successfully campaigned to delete my Wiki entry, which I didn't create, but was home, for a brief spell, to a rumor that I killed prostitutes.).

Wales doesn't see that becoming a problem in the often polarized world of gaming fandom.

"To some extent when you have an open forums people get into arguments, but by and large it is not the place for that sort of thing."

Wales seems to have a good game plan, already he's having his tech people look at creating tools that would make creating things like walkthroughs easier, he's added support for YouTube videos and is workig on both WYSYWYG support and more robust voting functionality. He even has a policy that prohibits taking ad revenue from gold farmers.

"Basically what we've decided to do is we ban all gold farming ads," he said. "It costs us some money, but it seems to be something that the community is really keen on. It's a tricky area, you want the ads to be relevant, on the other hand if the relevancy comes at the expense of the community's core values it just doesn't work."

The way Wales sees it, the biggest interest for the gaming Wikia will likely come from massively multiplayer online games. An area where printed guides can quickly become outdated.

"As gaming moves more into the MMO realm of things, things can change quickly in a game, either socially or in the program, which means that up-to-date information is more important," he said. "If you had a definitive guide to Doom back in the day, it is what it is, but with things like Lord of the Rings Online or WoW it's a moving target at all times."

And from the looks of the World of Warcraft wiki, the Wikia is keeping up, it even has its own easter eggs.

Gaming Wikia [Wikia]

• A tricked-out World of Warcraft screen looks like a cockpit — it's an amazingly sophisticated interface requiring multitasking and information translation skills.
• It's social — Joi is not only part of a clan for traditional monster-killing, but also several social clubs that include characters from the warring Horde and Alliance clans.
• The social aspects of WoW don't negate the immersive property of the game, despite some theorists' objections.
• South Park. Everyone loves South Park.

• Ross Mayfield is a paladin
• Ross is gonna die
• Jonas Luster is addicted

CEOs play 'World of Warcraft' in their downtime [ZDNet]