Godcraft

Godcraft

My Dad and Grandmother (83!) came over to spend a couple of weeks here in Korea and Japan this month and during his trip here we spent some time buying model train supplies and rebuilding the N-Scale model railroad on my balcony here with my 5 year old son. We have had a great time and it was a fun way for the three generations of Bethke's to hang out.

Why am I boring you with my family vacation drivel? Because, while playing with the trains, my Dad was wondering why we like model trains, bonzai trees, strategy games, making models, and of course online games! I realized that all of these activities are about creating worlds – so I coined a new word: “godcraft”.

Science Fiction novels have spawned a sub-genre called Cyberpunk (interestingly enough by an author named Bruce Bethke who I never met) and since has grown into a popular subgenre with well known books by William Gibson, Tad Williams and what is probably the best cyperbunk ever – Snowcrash by Neal Stephanson. This Cyberpunk genre talks in detail about an upcoming revolution of humanity where we will transform ourselves into an online existence.

Why am I writing about this? Well, I think it has already happened. Let me give a few examples that are personal... As I have mentioned before here in this column I play World of Warcraft here on the Korean server Doomhammer as a character named “iei” in “The Unforgiven” guild. This guild is composed of three groups: an odd mixture of gyopos, employees of GoPets and employees of another game company here in Seoul. We have a great time playing together, helping each other on quests, instances, and of course PVPing together! Fridays have become my favorite day of the week where we all gather in a PC-bang in Poee-dong to eat Papa Jon's Pizza and play from 7pm to 5am with over 12 of us in the same row of machines. It is great, great fun. As well as a strong way to build friendships. The World of Warcraft is really a World that I travel to often and spend a good deal of time there. I know the ebb and flow of the world, when it has a lot of players, or few, how the auction house is doing and whether or not there is PVP action at Tauran Mill, Grom Gol, or is the place just dead. Half of the guild members I have never met physically and may never. However, it is a true community of people that I spend time with – in fact much more time than my extended family such as my uncles and especially more than my neighbors that I know nothing about.

We are all truly building our own worlds. There is a video sharing site called http://www.youtube.com/ that is more popular now than most US network television networks! This place is about people uploading the videos that they think are interesting and are effectively re-programming what a great number of people watch. The achievements of Cyworld and MySpace are legendary and so on. What is common throughout this world from hardcore RPGs games such as WoW, to our GoPets and on to the social networking sites such as Cyrworld and MySpace.com to me all represent Godcraft.

We are all now living in worlds that we have created with our friends around the world. This is tremendously exciting to me. In the coming months in GoPets we will be releasing a our very cool new 3D housing system that allows our users to create wonderful play spaces for themselves and share these spaces with their friends. I usually avoid promoting GoPets in this column space; however, I am so excited by my new word Godcraft and how it explains beautifully the what we are doing not only at GoPets but all of us in this brave new online world. This summer GoPets users will be able to create their own villages, castles, and Italian with their friends and pets from around the world. Already on our test server some of our employees are making whole new amusement parks with rides!

Thinking about RSS, tracebacks, and web 2.0 technology I am very much looking forward to the now/future of 2006/2007 where our online worlds build bridges to each other and we are able to stitch together content and relationships in any manner we like.

I proudly told my Dad that one of the things I like best about moving here to Korea is it allowed me to make a very fresh start with life by taking with me the relationships of friends and family that truly were important and meaningful and allow the others to gracefully decay.

The world is the world you have made – Godcraft.

Originally posted on LiveJournal