SXSW08: the symbiotic relationship between games and wikis

If you’re a denizen of one of the more popular MMOs out there like World of Warcraft or Tabula Rasa, chances are you’ve visited their respective wikis for information. Useful tomes aren’t they? This subject was actually a point of interest at this year’s SXSW Interactive, where notable members of the gaming community talked about the symbiotic relationship between gamers and wikis. Read about it in the full article.

Trivia time! You guys know Wikipedia? Largest wiki in the world. Can’t miss it. Now, did you know World of Warcraft has its own wiki? Well, it’s the second largest wiki in the world, with 3 million unique users per month. That’s a lot of WoW gamers.

But what’s the point of that piece of info? Well, it gives you and idea of how games are becoming more and more complex that MMO communities actually need an encyclopedia wiki to keep track of what’s what. This was the point of discussion at one session in this year’s SXSW Interactive.

Featuring a panel of notable members of the community such as George Pribul (lead admin of WoWWiki), April “Cuppajo” Burba (Community Manager of Tabula Rasa), and others besides, the session talked about the symbiotic relationship between gamers and wikis.

In the session, the panelists described how a wiki for games gives gamers not only a sense of community, but also a way to have a more complete guide to the game than even what the developers themselves can provide.

They answered a lot of questions regarding video game wikis, such as how gamers will deal with incorrect data (it’s a self-policing community, they say), or what would happen if the developers step in to take the reigns from the fanbase (a bad idea, says Burba).

If you want to read on the whole session, you can follow the link below.

Via Massively