The good news is that Governor Palin has sufficient experience in public life to leave behind enough of a paper trail that we can discern her positions on many of the most important issues of the day. The bad news is that after taking this crash course in where she stands, I know that if she were elected I would be afraid to leave my apartment after sundown.

Also…

Despite his consistent party-line voting record, some independents and Democrats still think of Senator McCain as the most palatable, independent-minded Republican. But this is the sort of empty compliment a friend of mine once compared to being called “the coolest Osmond.”

A buddy of mine had a theory. His theory was ‘A boy, a ball, dream, Dick. A boy, a ball, a dream.’ And that was my life. I’m a gym rat. I absolutely love the game. The game has been so good to me.

Dick Vitale’s Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech

(Side note:  Even a year after purchasing it, the more I use my iPhone the more I love it and the more it becomes indispensible to me.)

Three of the videos from the Ted Conference were excellent in a both educational and entertaining and well worth watching if you get the chance.

Al Gore from 2006 – Speaking about 15 things you can personally do to avert the climate crisis. But the best part of the of this video is the first several minutes where Vice President Gore talks about life after politics. Laugh out loud stand up comedian funny.

Martin Seligman form 2004 – Speaking about positive psychology. Interesting background on the topic. Directly relates to Jane McGonical’s thoughts on Happiness and Game Design. I’m very interested to spend more time at the Authentic Happiness web site.

Ken Robinson from 2006 – Speaking about schools and creativity. This one is also laugh out loud funny…and also extremely informative. Extremely important (i think) for parents who have school age children.

One additional thing that strikes me about each of these three videos is the use of storytelling by each of the speakers as a mechanism for presentation. Each presenter are excellent storytellers, which makes the presentations extremely engaging and enjoyable.

Carmensita – Bollywood-style video from Devendra Banhart featuring his girlfriend Natalie Portman. I actually like it. Very catchy tune and goofy-fun video.

In Your Face Photography – Meant to post this a while ago, but Mick’s photography business site is up and running.

Why Guilds Fail

Ask any Warcraft player what the word “Drama” means to them in relationship to the game and they will most likely provide you with a definition focused around one of two game elements – loot or raiding.

As previously mentioned, loot (or gear) acquisition and distribution is one of the major functions of guilds within the World of Warcraft. Guilds serve as one (and arguably the most important) mechanism for “gearing up” players so that the membership of the guild can continue to progress through the content.

When inequities are perceived in a guild’s loot distribution process, drama ensues. If and when the inequities are repetitive and reach a level where they are felt to be atrocious, affected guild members will vote with their feet either by leaving the guild or by not participating in a guild’s raids.

As previously mentioned, loot is an enabler of an individual ability to progress through content. So, if a player does not feel that the guild is enabling their individual ability to progress through content as desired, then they will look for alternatives. This search is balanced only by the strength of their affiliation with other members of the guild.

An exodus caused by this sort of drama can serve to trigger a second reason why guilds fail – a misalignment between an individual player’s progression goals and the perceived ability of the guild to continue to progress.

Typically, guilds are characterized on a spectrum as being “Raiding” (or hardcore), “Casual” or “Social.” The difference between each is the focus on progression and the required commitment of the members to support the achievement of the progression goals of the guild.

Raiding guilds are very focused on progression. Raiding guilds often raid several nights each week and typically require a strong commitment from their membership. Social guilds are the opposite. They are least typically focused (as a whole) on the progression aspect of the game. They exist as a mechanism to support the conversational/social aspect of the game. Casual guilds exist somewhere between the two – raiding less frequently then a hardcore guild, but with an understood predisposition and desire to progress through the content.

A misalignment between a guild’s progression goals and those of an individual player can exist in either direction on the spectrum. If a player feels that a guild is not working hard enough or is not moving fast enough through the content, then he or she may leave to look for a guild that they believe will position them closer to facilitating the realization of their progression oriented goals.

Likewise, if a player feels that a guild’s progression goals requires more commitment then they can or are willing to offer, then they may choose to leave to find another guild that will assist with the achievement of their own personal progression goals and/or social requirements. Again, in each of these situations, the strength of the social bonds between an individual and the other members of a given guild serves as modifier between the alignment individual’s progression goals and the focus, commitment and ability of the group to progress.

The challenge with maintaining this alignment is that there is a multiplicative effect that exists between the goals of all of the individual members of a guild. A single player leaving because of a misalignment between his or her progression goals and that of the group can serve to create a vicious circle which causes a drastic reduction in the ability of a guild to progress and or in an extreme case, the dissolution of a guild altogether.

This occurs because as one players leave, other guild members assess the impact it has on the guild as a vehicle to support the achievement of their own progression goals. As other players decide that the guild can no longer satisfy their own individual goals, they may also decide to look for greener pastures. This provokes additional evaluations, and the circle continues.

Last but not least, if a player decides that a number of individuals within a guild are not the company we wish to keep, then he or she may choose to find another collection of players that more aligns with their own social interests.

Understanding why guilds fail is important because it help to define the practices required to promote guild success.

Upcoming: Some thoughts on practices to make guilds successful.

I’ve never been a Guild Master. I was an officer for a while of a small-medium size Horde casual raiding guild on Draenor. We enjoyed a long and successful run before our guild dissolved and scattered in its own little Diaspora.

What essentially prompted our dissolution was that our Guild Master and a few other leaders of the guild decided it was time for them to leave. We had successfully made guild leader transitions before, but this time we couldn’t find an established and respected member who at that time had the time and willingness to take on the responsibility.

As a result, about four months ago (although it seems much longer than that), I with some of the other officers in the guild helped to facilitate a merger (of sorts) with another guild on the server that appeared to have a culture and approach to the game that was close to that of our original guild. I, along with a number of my previous guild mates, are still at the new guild.

Currently, the new guild is experiencing its own growing pains and evolving from where it was at the point of our addition. All of this has gotten me thinking about the purpose of guilds, what it takes to make them successful, what causes them to fail and what is going to happen when the next expansion is released.

The Purpose of Guilds in World of Warcraft

It may be obvious to those who play, but Guilds exist within the World of Warcraft by design. Within the game, guilds serve a few very specific purposes.

The primary purpose of guilds is to facilitate progression through the end game content. Without aligning yourself with other players, progression through the end game content becomes exceedingly difficult.

Progression through end game typically occurs as the result of two factors.

First, it occurs through collective learning.

Most of the collaborative events (i.e. raids or instances) in WoW are similar to choreographed dance routines. To be successful, players must learn to execute their own individual part – their positioning, their role, etc. in the encounter. “Strategies” are simply the scripts of each one of the parts. “Learning the strategy” is essentially the rinse and repeat process of each player learning their role in a particular fight so that the group is able to complete it successfully on a frequent basis (i.e. to put it on “Farm” status).

Another element of the game which determines a Guild’s ability to be successful is the collective quality of the gear that the group has during a collaborative encounter. In the game, players frequently refer to some encounters as “Gear Checks.” A gear check is a designed barrier that serves to determine whether or not the group has successfully mastered the previous encounters sufficiently (as measured by the overall collective quality of its equipment) so that it can continue to progress.

In this way, guilds serve a secondary purpose which is to collaboratively optimize the quality of the gear of its individual members so as be able to enable the continued progression of the group through content. In this fashion, a guild obtains and allocates “loot” as a means to the end that is progression.

In short, the ability of a guild to progress is dependent on the collective ability of each individual to learn their part as well as the ability of the guild to optimize the overall quality of gear across its members.

A final purpose of guilds is to create the ability to connect with people we like and to filter us from having to deal with people we find annoying or disruptive.

In my experience, it is generally accepted among players that “Guild runs” are generally preferable to “PUGs” (i.e. pick-up groups). This purpose ties directly Jane McGonigal Four Key Principles of Happiness – specifically, “Time spent with people we like.”

Understanding the purpose of guilds is important because it serves as a basis for understanding why guilds succeed and why they fail. It also serves to understand how to make a guild from succeeding and how to keep it from failing.

Upcoming: Some thoughts on why Guilds fail.

From the “blog entries that should have been written months ago” category…

In hindsight, probably the single most valuable session (among the many valuable sessions) from SXSWi this past March was Jane McGonigal’s keynote (SXSWi Podcast, Slides). I say that simply because I am still thinking about it and how it applies to the experience design work that I do at IBM Interactive on a regular basis.

One of the underpinnings of Jane’s keynote was the application of happiness research (or positive psychology) to understanding the engagement created by games (specifically, mmorpgs)  – or alternatively, how we can use game design techniques to create happiness whether it through online user experience design or in general life.

In the Center, we’ve actually been talking about game-like user interfaces and interaction models for quite some time with our clients, but Jane’s linkage of happiness (and engagement) to game design provides a wonderful (and better) framework to think and talk about the value of game design in a way that is more complex that I had been previously thinking about it.

Two specific elements of her keynote which I found particularly interesting were her Economics of Engagement (also referred to as the “Four Key Principles of Happiness”) and her “10 Super Hero Powers” or new types of happiness that people are getting from playing multiplayer games (which she refers to as the “ultimate happiness engine”).

The four key principles of happiness (as identified by Jane McGonigal) are:

• Satisfying work to do.
• Experience of being good at something.
• Time spent with people we like.
• The chance to be a part of something bigger.

The experience of any of these or the combination of the four facilitates the creation of happiness or of engagement (in a fashion which directly relates to all of the conversation happening online right now about user engagement or creating community, etc.) The imperative implied (if it isn’t clear) is that to create social engagement (through social media or some other engagement channel) you need to be thinking about how you create an environment that facilitates the above principles for your users, customers, etc.

Additionally, she identifies a set of more specific “Super Powers” related to the key principles above that “amplify” the creation (or delivery) of happiness. These super powers are created (or provided) as part of the experience of massively multiplayer online games. Specifically, these super powers are:

Mobbability – The ability to do real-time work in very large groups a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously—“scalable collaboration.”

Cooperation Radar – The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.

Ping Quotient -measures your responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement and your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network. 

Influency – The ability to be persuasive in diverse social contexts and media spaces. Understanding that each work environment and collaboration space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.

Multi-Capitalism – Fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, and financial.

Protovation – Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure.

Open Authorship – Eating content for public consumption and modification; creating content for public consumption and modification.

Longbroading – Thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture.

Emergensight – The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity.

Signal / Noise Management – Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from massively multiple streams of data.

From a design perspective, creating experiences that allow people to experience or develop these skills amplify happiness (or user satisfaction).

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) – A sequel to the previous Dancing (2006) first shown to me by my sister back in 2006.

Did You Know? (Version 2.0) – Thought provoking piece on literacy in the twenty-first century.

PS – Happy Birthday Nikki!