Online Media Cultist

When it comes to hardcore gaming – online role playing games, World of Warcraft, intense first-person shooters, adventuring off into Nintendo Wii land with magic wands made “real” – I’m what they call a n00b. A newbie. I appreciate all of these activities intellectually, understand that they’re huge huge business nowadays, and love hearing people talk about their passion for them, but I simply strayed off the gamer’s path at some point during late childhood.

And I always figured that I’m so busy in other areas these days – reading, writing, interwebbing for work and play, getting outdoors and doing real life activities every now and again – that I could get away with not having all of these things (perhaps distractions, I thought, I’ll admit) in my life.

Which is certainly true. However, there was something about Grand Theft Auto IV that absolutely compelled me to go out over the weekend to both buy and Xbox 360 and GTA IV both.

And I’m absolutely delighted that I did. Within minutes of setting things up, I felt as close as is possible to driving around my old neighborhood in Queens without actually being there (and without the real world responsibility to do things like stop at stop lights and to take care to not run people over!). The game felt that “real.” The nearly endless boundaries of this gaming world, the interaction and personalities of the characters, the interlacing storylines, the mad grand size of it all is dizzying, quite frankly.

So this is all to say my perspective on the gaming world – as a web cultist and gaming n00b – is somewhat unique. Millions of people around the world are already hip to the gaming thing, of course. And GTA IV may simply be one of the better or even best products produced yet.

It reminded me how quickly things have changed and are changing. How entertainment and information gathering and collaboration are shifting from movie theaters and video arcades to the home. How treating music in anything other than digital form makes less and less sense. How buying and consuming and communicating from anywhere other than the home, the office, the palm (mobile), and online is making less and less sense in many ways.

We’re living in fascinating times.

And now, I have to get back to a fantastical car chase through the wildly and heart poundingly fictionalized streets of New York, er , Liberty City.

Before this week, if someone had brought up the Grand Theft Auto franchise to me, I would have shrugged my shoulders and perhaps offered a vague recollection that some values groups were in a panic years ago when the San Andreas version came out.

That’s all changed now. Grand Theft Auto IV is absolutely stunning, in every way. I’m not a hardcore gamer. I tend to enjoy casual games (like the addictive Desktop Tower Defense), but GTA IV has me ready to go out to purchase an Xbox 360 this weekend.

It’s the storyline, the characters, the attention to detail that I find most intriguing. As I told a coworker, I don’t really care about the shooting and driving parts (though those look amazing to be sure) – I just want to walk around and hang out in that world.

For a huge array of GTA IV message boards, blogs, and resources, check out the Mahalo guide page.

I don’t know about you, but I spent an embarrassing amount of time during the ’90s wasting time playing Solitaire and Minesweeper, the classic stalwart games that are included with Microsoft Windows.

Now, Minesweeper is back, albeit in live action movie trailer form. I find this kind of thing hilarious… “What happens when the timer reaches 999?” Brilliant!

The biggest fallacy that social news sites like Digg perpetrate is that their voting systems are organic, run by the community, that every story has an equal chance – based upon its merits – to reach the front page and find acclaim, and so on. It’s just not true, and likely never will be. The problem is that the more popular a social news site gets, there are that many more people submitting stories, that many more people trying to rig or manipulate the system to their benefit.

So it behooves social news sites to continually tweak the rules to appease each of its groups of users. I really like former-Netscape General Manager Jason Calacanis’ 80-19-1 rule here. This states that 80 percent of your audience will never participate (they will simply consume information), 19 percent will partake in such activities as voting and commenting, and one percent are your hard core users: the engine that keeps social news sites alive by submitting volumes of stories and participating in all parts of the site.

So the “big three” of social news sites – Digg, Reddit, and Netscape – all do tweak the rules, but Digg in particular is cagey about this, always harkening back to how the community rules the kingdom.

The truth is though that many people feel that a small group of “power users” controls a high percentage of stories that reaches Digg’s front page. Therefore, it can be construed that the community has relatively little influence on Digg at all, that a small oligarchy of sorts actually forms the editorial board that selects the stories that hit the front page (and therefore finds a huge audience of readers) each day.

Brian Carr, in “Is Digg Broken Beyond Repair?” asserts that Digg’s top 25 “power users” control as much as 70% of what reaches the front page. He then offers four solutions to “break” the oligarchy. Three of these, in my view, aren’t all that useful as they involve voting for spam, not voting at all, or boycotting the submissions process.

One solution though does point to the reality of the modern popular social news site: create alliances. Digg itself allows for this in that you can add friends to your profile. Theoretically, people can visit their friends’ profiles each day and vote for stories submitted by each one. However, the line here between friendly cooperation and “gaming” the system can get somewhat hazy.

But the fact is that for a story to have any chance at all of reaching Digg’s front page, it needs some level of pre-determined support. Once Digg publicly confronts this reality, it will be able to better respond to the complexities manifested by its own success.

In 2006, I think one of the most interesting developments in the online world was the convergence of blogger culture with social networking culture. Sites like Vox proved that social networks could successfully cater to grownups and bloggy-types, while blogs and social news platforms made efforts to beef up user profiles and social networking features such as friending, in-site mail, and media (pics, videos, audio, and text) sharing. One of my favorite social networking sites, MyBlogLog, is a stripped down social network that serves as a powerful networking and profiling tool for bloggers.

This year, I think there’s going to be a lot of action in combining the immersive virtual world of MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) with advanced social networking features. Or, 2D-meets-3D if you like. TechCrunch’s review of Kaneva showcases a good example, “a new social network that extends the concept of MySpace into a virtual world.”

While Second Life has received quite a lot of buzz, a fair criticism is that people don’t have a lot to do there. New MMOs will have a focus, even if it is to extend the hang out/check out bands/check out each other culture that thrives at massively popular social networking hubs such as MySpace. But I think that the online gaming world, more than anything, will incorporate web-based social networking features that support and extend existing game communities.

I’m still sifting through the avalanche of e-mail that piles up during a month away from the laptop, but I must make mention of the most interesting article I read today, sent to me around a week ago from my partner and buddy over at Blogcritics, Phillip Winn.

It’s a little experiment that Annalee Newitz of Wired pulled off: create crappy content and then buy your way onto Digg’s front page with it. That Annalee was able to do this when purposefully creating low-grade content (a blog that’s mission is to take pictures of crowds but offer no psychology of such or any commentary at all to explain it) tells us that Digg and all popular social news sites have a ways to go to lock out gamers and spammers.

It’s a good problem for Digg in that it proves that companies (such as User/Submitter) see value in offering a service that gets submissions onto the treasured real estate of Digg’s front page and that publishers are willing to pay to cheat to get that front page exposure. However, Digg will need to continue to become more sophisticated in sniffing out and squashing gaming and collusion.

From the publisher perspective, the negative ramification is that quality submissions can get squashed for appearing to be suspicious when in fact they may not be. Human interaction from site editors should be useful here, but that is also not always the case. Netscape editors, for instance, will at their discretion switch out story links on submissions to those that they feel are more original. In essence, they’re trying to prevent “re-blogging,” where a blogger will blatantly republish someone else’s content or excerpt a story and add no real value to it. That’s all fine and well, but I’ve witnessed numerous cases where unique takes on breaking news stories were dumped for a more “original” one. That practice is dangerous in that it will turn off eager news submitters and, for hardworking publishers, is generally non-cool.

Update: Jason Calacanis makes a great point in asking Digg to make bury/sink votes more transparent. Adding to that, I’d like for Netscape to be more communicative with publishers that are accused of re-blogging!

If you know what MMOPRG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) means, then you almost certainly bow down to the WoW. World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game set in an immersive world replete with guilds, alliances, beasties, and hordes, is built on the engaging concept of completing quests to gain experience and rewards within the game.

So engaging, in fact, that Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft has surpassed eight million subscribers worldwide.

The gaming world is enormous and online and growing and will influence all of the next wave of Internet development, from blogs to social networking to what is referred to in shorthand as MMOs (or massively multiplayer online). The convergence of “gaming” with what we tend to think of as socializing or networking is already happening, and will become much more commonplace in 2007.

All of this really struck home for me around a year ago when I heard an NPR report about gold farming, which just about blew my mind.