Reflections of raid leadership

I had the opportunity the other day to give a talk in game in World of Warcraft for the r u game series by the Games and public libraries group which was a real blast. Although the attendance was light, my friend and colleague Mark Chen did jump on, and along with the series host Ellen Forsyth we had a rather excellent conversation about everything from my work on guild leadership, to games as texts, and more. One thing that came up, as it invariably does, was the question of leadership skill transfer between WoW and other settings.

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Nested Communities of Practice #AERA2011

This post is a little delayed (as usual), but here are my slides from AERA. Notes and slides after the jump.

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Thinking about MMOs

I've been promising some thoughts on MMO design in this blog for quite some time already, and now that I've finally started playing a little WoW again (with the impending release of Cataclysm and what not), I figure now is a pretty good time to share a couple of the ideas I've had over the years. The real impetus for this post came from playing through the pre-Cataclysm quests. I had just stepped away from them at the point that I started writing this (two days ago), and on the whole I was struck by how the narrative pressure that's building in the Warcraft universe was almost completely washed out by the basic format of questing which remains more or less unchanged. More after the jump.

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