World of Warcraft‘s upcoming publish, we learned this week, will boast Twitter integration. Welcome, WoW, to the year 2011 when we were already complaining about the rise of embedded social media in MMOs from Champions Online to RIFT. Hooray!
I kinda like social media. I particularly like following interesting people and gaming personalities on Twitter. I use it for work and play. And yet I still don’t think I’d want to Tweet to my followers from inside an MMO. It’d be an immersion-breaker, a distraction, and possibly even an etiquette faux pas. I can see it now: “Why didn’t you get out of the fire?” “I was trying to attach a pic of our raid for my Twitters!”
But like most of Blizzard‘s game design appropriations, this one is slickly styled and implemented. Maybe I’d change my mind after using it a bit. Maybe it’s just another way of moving “dings” and “gratses” to a more global chat than ever.
What do you think? Do MMO players actually want social media integration, or is this just another weird attempt to merge the game with life and make us want to keep on subbing? Does this trend hurt or help communities? And do you use social media tools from inside any current MMOs?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
