Measuring mainstreamyness

Playing a priest in World of Warcraft makes it easier to find a group. Sound advice, but not one you would expect to come from the Wichita Eagle daily newspaper from Kansas.

I've always been fascinated with how games have moved from the nerdy fringe to the mainstream, and that is why I now signed up for Google Alerts. That is a service where you put in a search phrase, like "World of Warcraft", and it will send you an e-mail when Google scans something new with this search phrase in it. You can search the news, the web, or both, or even the Usenet newsgroups. You can choose whether to get the alerts as they happen, or once a day, or once a week.

So instead of just getting the news from the web sites you visit regularly, you get the news from all of the internet, including small newspapers like the Wichita Eagle, which you would be unlikely to visit otherwise. That is obviously a highly useful tool for a blogger like me; I'll give it a test run. My only fear is that I get flooded with too many links all reporting the same story. But if it doesn't work out, I can always turn it off again. Meanwhile I'll get a good impression on how much World of Warcraft has moved into the mainstream news.

How mainstream World of Warcraft is, is not just an academic question. It will have consequences on the relations between game companies and players. As the recent news about the "LGBT friendly guild" in WoW showed, the law of the virtual world is not always identical to the law of the real world, in this case on freedom of speech. Big differences also exist on property rights. Now as long as a game has something like 100,000 players, the game company can do pretty much as they please, because nobody really cares. Get to over 5.5 million players, and controversial decisions by the game company have a completely different echo.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:59 AM Permanent Link