Of MMOGs and Radars
by Alex
I’m just at the very edge of the F/OSS world, and so I’ve always enjoyed the uber-idea aggregators at O’Reilly. Tim’s stuff in particular has always been super resonant and mind-expanding for me. Their ability to intuit and articulate future trends is useful, at least to someone like me. Now there’s the “O’Reilly Radar Blog”:http://radar.oreilly.com/. I’m excited and hope it will live up to its potential.
Second, this brief post at Zengestrom.com on “object-centered social networking services”:http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html puts its finger on something very important that I was hoping no one would articulate until I had time to write about it. Let me just say in a compressed, occulted form the idea that is driving my research on virtual worlds: Social networks are not so much object-centered as _project-centered_. The ability to provide a project to hang a society on is what makes game type virutal worlds more interesting than Second Life. But more on that later.
I’m surprised that the literature linked to from that post fails to cite Wenger’s work on “Communities of Practice,” which in linguistic anthropology is considered one of the defining texts on activity-centered social networks.
Wenger E. _Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity_ Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, N.Y. (1998)