Jonkichi is Joi Ito’s blog about his dealings in World of Warcraft. How someone who does as much as he does still manages to be a guild leader in WoW is beyond me.

But he makes an interesting point in this blog post about the way WoW is designed. It points out that even at the hardware architecture level there is a profound effect on the shape of social interaction (and therefore collaboration, culture, and everything) in the game world. Much like in “real life.”

… this is one of the fatal design problems with World of Warcraft. In Second Life, each island has a server and they try to get people to scatter out across the world. In Second Life it is one world with each region connected. In Warcraft, we have over a hundred servers on various continents and “instances” in areas of each server making many many copies of the same game. This gives you a very very small chance of actually being able to meet people that you know in WoW even though you both play. I realize that it’s a fundamental difference, but from a social perspective the results of this “sharded” system that WoW uses are devastating.