Welcome to the Blue Garter online organizational profile.
Through my years of experience in online interaction, I have seen that elements
of virtual worlds often closely mirror those of the real world. From the
sports similarities found across the world at such competitions as those
sponsored by the Cyberathlete
Professional League, to the episodes of the notoriously cited Second
Life, which is now under the scrutiny of both the IRS and legal entities
for its denizens' alleged tax
evasive exploits and other
interesting reality questioning phenomena, we find that virtual worlds
may be more real than tradition would lead us to believe. In a plethora
of ways, video games are no longer "just video games," as real
lives, real money, and real morals become increasingly involved.
The primary purpose of my work is to establish a parallel between team-leader
interaction in a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environment and that
interaction in the business world. This objective begins to be tackled by
a detailed explanation of an example organization coupled with analysis
of that organization's management systems. As researchers once used sports
figures and coaches to model business people, I now aspire to use organizations
of the virtual realm to the same end. And if you are about to mumble "geek"
and close your browser, I would urge you first to read over this brilliant
article from Seriosity's Partnership with IBM Research: Virtual
Worlds, Real Leaders; Online games put the future of business leadership
on display.
The various articles and features found in this site are littered with jargon and buzzwords esoteric to the MMO community. If you are unfamiliar with the nature of MMOs you should head to the "What is an MMO?" section to be primed on the basics, after which you will have a clear understanding of the site's main ideas.
Site Features
The Summary View feature allows viewers to quickly glean a very general idea of the entire site in less than a minute by clicking through the headers of each page. If you're pressed for time and don't want to spend a bunch of time consuming the whole site, get up there and start clicking!
Mouse over groove-underlined text to view a definition of the term in question. This feature is conveniently implemented to provide in-line support so that flipping back and forth to the glossary page is unecessary. Each glossary term is equipped with this feature on its first occurrence of each page.
Both the external links section found on the left navigation bar and a
few links throughout the site lead to pages that were written for some specific
purpose or to solve a real-time problem in the interest of the organization.
Their tone, style, and content serve to give the reader insights into the
business-like orientations of these online teams' communications.
A few pieces of media, such as a Youtube recording of in-game footage with
voice communication included as well as pictures from internal message boards,
can be found with explanations that should supplement the verbal explanation
of these concepts.
The real names and locations of some of the players referenced throughout
the profile, when known, are noted in parentheses to confirm both their
existence and the somewhat personal nature of these long distance social
relationships.