For people that do not play World of Warcraft, the first part of this post is not relevant. Jeff Kaplan, the lead world designer for World of Warcraft, is moving on. No, he’s not leaving Blizzard, but he’s no longer working on World of Warcraft (more on this in a moment). Rob Pardo, VP of Game Design at Blizzard, often gets a lot of credit for WoW (made Time’s list of 100 most influential people in the world in 2006), but it was Kaplan who spent countless hours interacting with the community via his presence in all the betas, as well as interacting heavily with players via the official wow forums early in the game’s lifespan. You can hear part of his story in the third Warcraft retrospective at game trailers.
If you’ve ever played warcraft and certain aspects of the game really stand out as memorable moments or experiences…chances are Kaplan had a hand in that. He had a huge hand in shaping the experiences of 14 million people over the last six years. I struggle to fathom how someone like Jeff managed to pull ALL the elements of a game like WoW together, and turn them into powerful, memorable experiences for so many people.
Enough of memory lane. What I find very interesting is that Kaplan is moving on to Blizzard’s “Next-gen, unannounced MMO”. I vaguely remember Blizzard hinting at this a year or so ago, and it appears that it must be moving forward at a decent pace. If Kaplan is being moved to the project, I would assume they already have core technologies in place for this game so Kaplan and the design crew can begin their magic. But why a new MMO from Blizzard? They already have the MMO market (and arguably most of the PC gaming market) cornered. Why create a competitor for your own product? Ultima Online intended to make a UO2, but eventually scrapped the project in favor of expansions and updating the original UO instead of creating a competitor. Will this new, next-gen MMO significantly impact warcraft? Probably.
Then again, this is Blizzard. Their track record is impeccable, all their games are critically acclaimed, and after the merger with Activision, they are now part of the biggest force in the industry right now (which allows for even more resources of all kinds). Whenever this game arrives on store shelves, it will certainly be worth checking out…
…and if it’s anywhere near as good as WoW (my bet? it will be), many people will go beyond just ‘checking it out’ and be treated to a plethora of fun and memorable experiences crafted by Kaplan and his team.
It’s been an interesting week for a lot of reasons. I was interviewed for a show on the Big Ten network called “The Millennials” about generational differences, primarily around technology. I also had to deal with filing a few insurance claims on my home owner’s policy.
Stay with me here, there is a connection…
When filing my claims, my agent asked for copies of the receipts. I rarely, if ever, keep paper-based receipts. The ones I do keep would probably take me 4 hours to find between my office and my house. Organization is definitely not my strong suit. My father, a retired insurance agent, could not BELIEVE I didn’t save all this stuff. He’s hyper-organized. So after giving me an ear full on the phone about this, I asked him how long it would take him to find a claim from last year he filed for his home. In the time it took him to answer, I had searched my Gmail account and found the digital receipts of all the work I had done on my home that I need to forward to my claims agent. Search trumps organization in this case.
Gmail vs. my MS Outlook email account is like night and day. In Outlook, I have an ungodly number of emails in my inbox, hundreds of directories with more email within…total chaos. It’s hard to find stuff in Outlook, mostly due to my poor organization but also do to its poor search functionality. Gmail, on the other hand, is wonderful. I label my emails once in a while, but I mostly just let them sit. My Gmail inbox is ~1700 messages, and I can still find things from three years ago with ease based on the search capabilities. No organization necessary.
I talked about this a bit during the interview, and all the students agreed: organization is over-rated, search takes less time and is more accurate in many instances. To reinforce this notion, I’m finding that taking notes in my personal blog space is also paying dividends. I received a note from a sponsor that I have not worked with for over two years about a conversation he wanted to revisit. I typed the sponsors name into my blog search…voila, the notes from all the meetings with the sponsor from two years ago. Being unorganized might well pay off 
Amazon released their new game portal under the cover of darkness this week. All the titles appear to be casual games for a very cheap (under $10). I’ve wrote a lot about Steam in the past, which is a great platform for digitally distributing AAA games and indie games. But outside of the PC gaming community, not many folks know Steam exists. Some interesting questions regarding Amazon’s game portal:
- How much are users willing to pay for casual games when similar alternatives exist for free on the web via things like Flash?
- If the portal is successful, will Amazon scale to include larger, AAA titles?
I never used Amazon’s music service, but many of my friends (apple fanboys even) have jumped ship from iTunes to Amazon for their mp3 fix. If they can grow the game portal to a similar level…wow.
