Been a while....

Ok so i've kind of neglected this blog for a few months now.... but i have a good reason.

Yea... WoW isn't a great reason, but it is a reason in my opinion. Anyway now i once again kicked the habit simply cause i think i really have clocked the game (or it feels like it to me, despite what other people say). Anyway, i won't have time this semester for diddling around in raids for 4 or 5 hours at a time. And i think it is definately time to move on.

So in the interest of moving on, i would like to discuss what this semester means for me. Hard work is a good place to start. Last semester i felt i worked very hard on the projects i was assigned to. That said, i didn't make much of an effort to have a meaniningful group relationship, and just plowed through the work by myself (leaving my groupmates in the dust at times, confused and bewildered). This is how i'm used to working.... i almost feel constrained when i have to keep other people up to speed on what i'm doing and why i'm doing every little thing. This worked fine last semester, when the work was manageable that i could complete it myself without too much hassle and my teammates made a reasonable effort to keep up to speed. This semester my teammates are even more competent, but the project work has become more complicated by several orders of magnitude.

For my software project we have been tasked with developing an interactive webapp, in the course of 6 months of uni. The plus to this is that this paper has no lectures, no tutorials, no exam. The downside is that we have to create a fully functional webapp in 6 months, when no one in out group has experience in building webapps (apart from my own minor experience) or working with a SQL server backend. Most of us are lacking in even basic experience with C# (which we want to use) because the university courses we did were taught in Java. This brings me to another point about this project; we are the only group of 3 in the paper doing this project in .NET. This means our tools will be a bit better (despite being proprietry), but we won't have access to as many resources (our lecturers don't have much experience with .NET.

Anyway this project alone should keep me very busy writing AJAX code to interface the backend with the frontend. I was chosen for this task simply becausei'm the only one with any Javascript experience, which i have no problems with since it makes my job easier, butit'll be ice to try out C# at some stage on something that isn't mission-critical.

So i'll try update here when i can about how the project is going. If the time strikes me.

Keep Thinking.

Ubiquitous Questing

The majority of people have been exposed to one MMO game or another these days. I myself was fortunate enough to discover World of Warcraft (WoW), but i had to quit several months ago, because WoW was becoming too involving. Basically i was addicted, and like an addictive substance it would take up all my time (although fortunately not all of my money, since that was capped at about $25 a month). I was thinking about this, and about how so many people experience the same or similar draw from WoW or other MMO games. The main reason i can see that WoW has been so successful is the avalanche effect: people would start playing the MMO, and get their friends/family to join, and they would in turn get their friends/family to join. There is a certain level of draw in the game itself, but once you have played WoW and levelled a character the maximum level you've prettymuch seen most of the content there is to see (but high-end raiding content keeps the serious players hooked). What keeps the people who joined in droves playing is the social networking; to remotely interact with the people they play with, to form relationships through the game.

This social structure in World of Warcraft is very-much Guild-centric. Guilds in World of Warcraft are mini-communities of players who cooperate towards a common goal or with a common ideal. In WoW this is usually Player versus Player (PvP) content or Player versus Environment (PvE) content. PvE content is the objective shared by most guilds, and revolves around working in teams of 5 to 40 (in original WoW content) to achieve objectives. These objectives usually involve killing a series of monsters in a dungeon with a mix of skill, preparation and coordination. This is what caused me to become so interested in the game; the level of coordination that was undertaken during a raid was amazing; 10 to 40 people cooperating to assail a beast 100 times their size and strength, it was teamwork to a degree i had never seen before. Furthermore, because of the in-game communication systems and the modding community supporting World of Warcraft, the experience could be made as plain or as exciting as one wished. Additionally there was fruther cooperation (largely) in raids when items were being shared among groups. People would have to decide who would recieve an item, and because there is usually so few items compared to the number of people who participate in a raid, the decision would have to be fair and unbiased.

Now my idea was this; why not create a new type of social networking website where people can track their progress through "life" in the same way people track each other on World of Warcraft. Why not objectivise life, organise it into small bite-size chunks that each person can track; with tagible, specific rewards for each "quest"; as well as each "quest" rewarding each individual with an amount of experience that goes towards their "level" on the completion of the task. The type of things people do in World of Warcraft and similar MMOs are not that different from real life; they involve long spans of monotonous work, but people are driven to complete this work for the rewards, and the virtual social standing that goes with it. So if a similar system was used in real life, could we convince more people to excel in their daily lives, to make things seem slightly more manageable and simple?

The short answer is no. There are many barriers to such a system; the largest of which is the complexity factor. WoW is made up of a discrete set of tasks, each with set starts and ends, and the end game content relies on the fact that everyone is at an equal level. Having lots of people spread out over many "levels" of such a system would make it harder for people to find common ground; i.e. common tasks and common objectives. One way to solve this would be to somewhat simplify life's tasks; make generic tasks that cover a wide range of real-life tasks and objectives. Another way would be for people to define their own tasks, but this could create disparity in the definition of tasks and their rewards; this decreases the perceived value of the completion of tasks, because people find it harder to use the rewards of such tasks as a schedule against which to grade other people.

The system could be successful if properly adapted, otherwise it could be a catastrophic flop. The other major part of the system and would cause either success or failure is the social networking and communications. The great thing about wow social networks is they are very close to ubiquitous (at least while in game). Players who are online can be whispered from anywhere in the game world, and there are global chat channels which span the whole world (but confined within a particular server. While we are on the topic; i think it is interesting that wow works with small units such as the servers. There is no doubt if the game simply listed one server then not only would the traffic and resource usage on that server cell be insane, but the noise inside the game would also be very loud; by this i mean public chat channels would be bursting. This would allow anyone on the network to contact anyone else; but the downside is all of the background noise that swamps public chat channels. The reason WoW is run on seperate server pods is because of the performance issues, but i think it creates an interesting social bubble; generally when people migrate from one bubble to another or to a new bubble they are drawn by other people, so the loss of communication with other people in other bubbles is not so significant.

I think i'll leave it there for tonight, i have a hacking cough and an exam on monday, so wish me luck.