SDForum: Joi Ito’s keynote

He played on the first MUD at Essex university with Richard Bartle. He’s a WoW guild leader and an island owner in Second Life. He’s also a big wheel in the dot com world, as a VC and as a board member, and so on. And below is my notes on his speech.

His typical desktop has running a WoW screen, a #joiito IRC channel, and Second Life at the same time.

Cyberspace. A word Americans came up with, we talk about Snow Crash… this whole concept is holding us back a little bit. it comes from this idea that when you are at the computer you are immersed, and when you close it, you are away form it. It’s binary. This is not the case for a lot of people who use mobile devices, who think of ubiquitous computers not as portals into cyberspace, but as the world in your poicket. A lot of kids in Japan blindtype text in their pockets. It’s seamless, part of the real world. So this idea of cyberspace, tied together with this idea that fantasy roleplaying should be immersive and that voice chat should cause a damage imnmersion… it’s something we need to get beyond. These ideas are coming from the US… where there’s a fairly specific geography, and you spend time traveling while driving, and you carry a laptop. In other areas, you can’t have a laptop, you don’t spend time driving, and you don’t want to share a screen.

To me, cyberspace is all about presence. “Polychronic time” is a theory that there’s two waysto manage time. In one way, you manage time and space very clearly. Mine, yours. The other way is very contextual, very fluid. Polychronic time doesn’t scale, but it is very contextual. Monochronic time means everything is segmented, but you lose context because one meeting follows another unrelated meeting. Monochronic time helps you scale, but there’s values to polychronic time.

On a typical morning, I wake up and see 5-600 people online and see everyone I could talk to on my contact list. And I form an impromptu meeting on whatever topic feels right, like voice in virtual space or something. The whole day is a continuous conversation, polychronic. We use Teamspeak for the audio in the background in WoW. Hardcore gamers have this on all the time. Everyone says Skype, oh wow, but everyone feels uncomfortable when the conversation is voer… but in TS, it’s always on, and I have it playing in the stereo in the background of my house while I am cooking… it’s like being in a big room or an office together and you stand up and ask a question… it’s not uncomfortable to hav the audio on. My sister uses the phrase “mutual co-presence.” It’s about always on and mutual copresence and not cyberspace.

The typical person has 4 or 5 people that they always know the “state” of. The idea here is that I know what everyone is doing, what state theyare in. I can go into WoW and see. I give you this as an exmaple because I am personally using WoW very much like I would use IM. We use different spaces for different things — pop into SL for showing a video, quest in WoW. polychronic time is considerably more efficient now because we have the tools, and I find polychronic thinking more creative.

I kind of disagree with osme of the people in the room who have talked about the systems staying closed. I think it will eventually become open. People in my guild are pushing hard to merge allof these tools. I can’t do this on my mobile phone. 80% of our communication is outside of the game, external tools. If we could switch WoW with a WWII game, 80% of what we do would stay the same.

What you are addicted to in a good guild is each other. The WoW quests are set up to require a substantial amount of cooperation. You start out doing things for yourself, but you eventually realize that being self-sacrificial makes you feel good. The young kids in the guild are learning about how to be responsible. It only takes one raid wipe to teach a 12-14 year old kid that there are moments when you need to be focused. It’s not like telling a kid to pipe down in church and when they ask why saying “because because.” Being demoted stings. We’re now having meetups, relationships, and so on outside of the game. Most of the leaders in our guild are not leaders in real life. A medic, a construction worker, a bartender, insurance sales, soldiers, disc jockeys. The high-tech entrepreneurs and CEOs aren’t that important in our guild. If you are paying $15 a month, you are going to choose your own boss, and you choose thos ewho create fun atmpsheres, not good top-down managers. You have to have bottom-up leadership. Most of our leadership is women.

(Argh, mistyped something, closed the browser window, and lost half of the notes I took!)

Other stuff he said, mostly form memory: He would like to replicate instance areas in SL to plan WoW raids. He expects to do a lot more actual day to day business in SL over time. He runs WoW guild like Wikipedia runs, consensus based. He thinks that this all needs to converge. He thinks enterprise software will need to develop into the kid of UIs that games have. Need open APIs. Since his days of playing muds, he’s seen the community fragment, PKers versus MUSHers and so on, and he sees the same thing going on now… Wishes you could export WoW characters into SL, check items, and so on. Use them for machinima. No clubhouse in WoW, and wants one. 3d printing of your character is pretty cool. I guess it’s a legal issue, but maybe we should do it first and ask later.

Jerry Paffendorf says that he’s planning ways to hook together SL and WOW via IRC and WoW chat going out and maybe video…

Apparently, the video will be available for this talk and and all the others, at some point. I’ll try to keep an eye out).