“You have entered a room with three other monsters, there is a door and a gnome standing in front of it what do you do?”
MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) and virtualization (being there while not being there)is really getting “alls grown up” in mass media. What Twitter, Facebook and World of Warcraft have in common is that real-time user generated interactions that are shared by other users is where popular media is headed.
This is not new and story telling is what makes us human.
As architects in this domain what is new is the opportunity to devine a language, a system, that frames a foundation to support and reflect user generated media in a compelling, interactive and entertaining manner. This is real hard. Relevance and context to what you are doing must be seamlessly tied to other possibilities and actions that automatically makes sense to you.
Again we go back to roles, tasks and objectives. But here the combinations are infinite in nature making it very difficult to hone in on an optimal user experience. Classic user experience methodology just no worky!
What to do? What elements of this new user experience can help us frame better engaging social media?
Twitter shows us to keep it simple and focus on 1 thing. Speed of sharing information. Even with a command-line UI, the essence of the experience is not about what people are doing but sharing it immediately, everywhere with others.
With Facebook, context is king. How you relate to everyone around you is automatic, fun and engaging. What binds all these possibilities is your preferences extrapolated with the preferences of others constraining all the possible combinations into what would be most fit for you.
And finally, a visual language that compels you to perform and drive your motivation. With World of Warcraft, the library of items, zones, and guilds is vast but fixed enough for players to visciously compete with peers to have the highest “epeen” (the most inspected gear). Even in a virtualized community, humans pursue what they see and value what is most desired. Building a robust and intricate inventory of virtual goods that helps to distinguish identifiable characteristics of your character is what makes WoW so addictive.
All these elements come together based on the sum of individuals playing in a shared environment. Building a next generation user experience framework must assume this foundation and sample the unique personalities and interests that will influence your virtual universe.
“Tell one monster that the gnome likes the other two monsters but not him” 
