From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft
a part of their lives. How do you play WoW
? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.
Let's get Joichi Ito's professional credentials out of the way first. The 44-year-old Japanese venture capitalist is the
incoming director of the avant-garde
MIT Media Laboratory. A self-professed "informal learner" (he dropped out of college twice and never finished a degree) now shines as one of the stars of the digital age, serving on the board of directors for
Creative Commons,
Technorati,
ICANN, and
Mozilla, and catching the wave as an early-bird investor in
Last.fm,
Flickr, and
Twitter.
Currently a resident of Dubai (he moved there so he could get a better feel for the people and the region), he circumnavigates the globe a full two times every month in the course of his international pursuits. According to his
Twitter stream, he's been scuba diving in Japan this week taking underwater radioactivity samples; after catching the bug to learn how to dive, he promptly became a master diver and now is a PADI open water instructor. He's the godson of psychedelic explorer
Timothy Leary ...
... and a guild leader in
World of Warcraft. "My feeling is that what we are doing in
WoW represents in many ways the future of real time collaborative teams and leadership in an increasingly ad hoc, always-on, diversity intense and real-time environment," he wrote in
his blog back in 2006. In fact, one of his
presentations on WoW made it into an early incarnation of our Moviewatch feature in 2007.
So yeah, we're going to talk about
WoW ... Need anything else to cement his gaming cred? Two more tidbits: Ito's GMed a
WoW raiding guild since the original days of Molten Core, and he owns an actual handwritten map drawn by
Richard Bartle, creator of the first MUD -- it's like the Magna Carta of gaming.
Continue reading 15 Minutes of Fame: MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito on WoW
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15 Minutes of Fame
15 Minutes of Fame: MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito on WoW originally appeared on
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