The rise of virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Everquest) has prompted new questions about the status of games in a digital age. Thomas Malaby’s research at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, suggests that game design and game development practice are becoming a key part of how some high tech companies operate. Instead of relying on top-down and procedural decision-making, these organizations contrive complex and game-like systems that promise to generate legitimate decisions from the ground up
But there are ideological commitments behind these efforts, with their roots in post-WWII American ideas about technology, authority, and they include even a rather peculiar notion of what being human is all about. In this transformation of the workplace – and our online experience – the human is imagined as a gamer of a particular kind. Malaby considers what this way of thinking about the human, one that saturates many of the institutions currently architecting digital society, tells us about the changing status of technology, creativity, and authority for a digital age.
20. “I was always struck by the expressive and,
not so much societal elements…I didn’t go in
feeling like we’re going to make people’s lives
better. But I did go into it feeling like none of it
was interesting unless there were a lot of
people involved.”
- Philip Rosedale, Founder of Linden Lab
32. Constant and his New Babylon -- http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/situationist/constant.html
33. Thomas Malaby
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
malaby@uwm.edu
www.uwm.edu/~malaby
Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life
(June 2009, Cornell University Press)
