Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft - May 9-11, 2008
This is a scientific conference to be held May 9-11, 2008, inside World of Warcraft, devoted to research on WoW and on virtual worlds in general. It was proposed by John Bohannon, who creates the Gonzo Scientist feature for the AAAS journal Science. The organizer is William Sims Bainbridge, a social and information scientist, whose conference e-mail address is wsbainbridge at gmail dot com
About the sessions:
The three academic sessions of this conference will not attempt to duplicate the (dreary) experience of traditional academic conventions, where high-status individuals read aloud long papers, while the low-status masses in the audience sit like victims rather than engaging in a more equal debate. Rather, we will exploit the advantages of text-based chat - and avoid dealing with the challenges of voice chat which works poorly beyond perhaps five participants.
The chair of each session will prepare a list of ten questions, to be posted ahead of time on this wiki. The panelists for the given session will prepare their own very brief answers to these questions, perhaps as short as a single sentence. The chair will begin the session by using the prepared questions in interview format, asking them of specific panelists. For example, in the first session, the chair could have questions asking specific researchers about their different projects. As appropriate, given the question "in question," any participant can contribute answers or other responses, typing them into the chat.
Chairs: Bonnie Nardi and Hilde G. Corneliussen
Panelists: Celia Pearce, Nic Ducheneaut, Tanya Krzywinska
Session 2: Relationships between WoW and the "Real World." (12 noon EDT, May 10th)
Location: Main cavern of the Undercity sewers (Undercity 32,32).
Chair: Dmitri Williams, University of Southern California
Panelists: Timothy Burke, Julian Dibbell, Constance Steinkuehler, Nick Yee
Session 3: The Future of Virtual Worlds (12 noon EDT, May 11th)
Location (24,76):The Old Fort on the side of Booty Bay away from the dock.
Chair: William Sims Bainbridge
General information from the conference wiki, which will also help you locate the conference on WoW:
We suggest you read the following points carefully, because they explain how you can deal with various problems and make best use of your conference experience.
1. In case of a general problem affecting the conference: Check the home page of this wiki for any last-minute announcements. We can update this wiki in a matter of seconds.
2. If you cannot get into the realm for a conference session: On rare occasions a WoW realm gets full, which means about 4,000 people online at the moment, in which case you wait your turn to get in. At other times, there is a technical problem, and you must try repeatedly until Blizzard fixes the problem.
3. If the server crashes because of excess load: We have selected locations we believe can handle high load, and our experience with crashes apparently caused by load have been limited to outlying areas. We believe Blizzard employs load balancing, which means that the server will settle down after perhaps five or ten minutes of repeated crashes. If worst comes to worst, the home page of the wiki will urge people who can get on to spead out across different parts of the world, thereby reducing the load at the conference site, because we can communicate via the guild chat where ever we are.
4. You cannot attend a session for whatever reason: Attend the others. We could easily schedule additional meetings of subsets of participants to augment any of the sessions.
5. You want a record of the text from a session: You may save a complete log of all the text received by your character during one period online by typing in the command line (text chat) at the beginning: /chatlog
6. You want a visual record of still pictures: Pressing the PrintScreen key saves the contents of the screen as a JPG file in the screenshots folder of your World of Warcraft program folder. To get rid of the interface information to get a clean picture, use Alt-Z. To restore, use Alt-Z again. You may wish to use the mouse wheel to view the scene from your character's eyes. You may also wish to go into the user interface control and turn off display of player's names, and not click on anybody when taking a picture, to avoid cluttering the picture with names.
