Gaming adapted Web 2.0 elements EARLY

Hi all, I concluded last week's post with a diatribe about MySpace. I'd like to discuss how I interacted with and simultaneously built online communities around games in the mid to late 2000's. Specifically, I'm talking about games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft, as well as online services like Xbox Live. These services were all released earlier than I was able to play them: Runescape in 2001, Xbox Live in 2002, and World of Warcraft in 2004. These services were perhaps my experience with Web 2.0. I was interacting with them before MySpace and Facebook emerged, which were later than these game services. I'll mainly speak on World of Warcraft, but all of these services really offered the same thing: virtual communities that you could interact with and collaborate with in-game. Typed chat was always available, as was voice chat (more prevalent in Xbox Live). World of Warcraft was so exciting to me at the time because it was the first time I'd seen a game with these online capabilities. I could play autonomously, collaborate with others, or use the game to talk to others while I was doing my own thing.

This was a stark contrast to my experience with gaming up to this point, where if I wanted multiplayer components, I'd be sitting next to someone and looking at the same screen. I was introduced to these gaming and Web 2.0 elements early enough in my lifetime, where I was right on the precipice of being a digital native- "parallel processing and multitasking" (Prensky, 2001). Because I was acclimated to those massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) elements early on, I feel like I'm still a native rather than an immigrant when I have students discuss their experiences online with Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. I feel like, it's the same thing, just a different generation. It is on a massive scale in a more intimate digital environment, though. I'll paraphrase because I can't recall the exact quote, but I saw a TikTok earlier this week where an interviewed development psychologist mentioned the dangers of Roblox, saying it was like dropping your child off in a virtual world that was '5 times the size of Tokyo'.

I'll attach the reel here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYh1_XDuXtb/

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