Joi Ito in a Japan Times interview, on games, and specifically World of Warcraft:
Video games have always been kind of stigmatized, and they are kind of a working-class entertainment. When I go to my WoW guild, my raid leader is a night-shift nurse. We have bartenders. We have unemployed people, lots of military folks, policemen — there is a community made up of a very diverse set of people. And what’s interesting is that every single MBA who has tried to take the leadership role in the guild has failed. Leadership in these kinds of situations is much more about listening, and leadership is not exclusive to people in the leading class. It kind of translates into, say, understanding how open-source projects work, or how Firefox might be managed. This may all sound like a very long, elaborated excuse for playing lots of World of Warcraft. (Laugh) But I can learn a lot of things in places where typically people don’t think there is learning.
I wonder if anyone has done any studies on the social/economic backgrounds of the people who play WoW… (thinking about it, this could be difficult to do – you don’t provide such information when you create an account on WoW.)
I like what he has to say about financial success:
I’m financially successful enough so I’m able to give a reasonable amount of money to organizations I want to give to; I’m able to eat just about anything that I want to without worrying about how much it costs.
By this reckoning, I’m a financial success too! 🙂
And Joi’s life focus:
The focus of my life is to try to make my environment better. “Better” to me means surrounding myself with stimulating people and ideas, continuing to learn. My company name — Neoteny — has negative connotations, too, but it means retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. Child-attributes include, but are not limited to, the feeling of wonder, curiosity, joy, funny things, growth — and those are all things that I want to always continue to have in life.
The negative side of that is I tend to lack persistence sometimes. I don’t want to be the CEO of a company where I do the same thing every day. As a personality type, I’m much more of a network person, where I’m part of connecting things together, and probably less about repeating production activities. But I think you need all types. If everybody in the world was like me, it wouldn’t work. (Laugh)
Boredom avoidance is not necessarily a bad thing, then!
(Via Lawrence Lessig’s blog)
Addendum: I should have added that I am fascinated by interviews and love reading them. I’d like to learn how to conduct them, as well – especially via email, for blogging purposes. This article on e-lis is interesting: E-Mail Interviewing in Qualitative Research: A Methodological Discussion.