Computer engineer Jim Waldo discussed how the Internet has affected computer gaming and other industries during a talk at Halligan Hall yesterday afternoon.
Waldo is the chief architect of Project Darkstar, a source to help online gamers and developers avoid problems including data corruption and zone overlapping.
In his speech, titled "A Preliminary Report from the Project Darkstar Anthropological Expedition Into the Unexplored Jungle of Massively Scaled Online Games and Virtual Worlds," Waldo focused on how the online gaming industry is unlike other fields in computer science.
"Online games need to be fun, they need to be cool," Waldo said. "It involves publishers, production houses, producers, artists, coders."
He asked the crowd of computer science professors and students, "When was the last time that you did an enterprise application that needed to be 'fun?'"
Later in the talk, Waldo turned to lucrative online games, including the popular World of Warcraft.
"There are approximately 10 million World of Warcraft subscribers, who each pay $15 a month for their subscription," Waldo said. "And because the average retention time is two years, that means that they are making over $1.8 billion a year."
As a result of such whopping revenues, a lot of popular online gaming companies are switching from the typical gaming model to acting as service companies, Waldo said.
"World of Warcraft [has] 2,700 employees worldwide, but about 2,000 of those are customer service employees who pick up angry phone calls from gamers who are experiencing problems in their game," Waldo said. "If you ask me, those characteristics make it sound a lot more like a service company than a gaming company."
Waldo mentioned Webkinz, a different type of company that he said is changing its business model because of the Internet. It is a stuffed animal manufacturer that includes a "secret code" with each stuffed animal that allows access to the "Webkinz World" Web site. On the site, children can play with virtual versions of their toys.
"With 100,000 Webkinz users at any time, the numbers are truly staggering," Waldo said. "And that's only in the United States and Canada. It's going to be a lot bigger once Webkinz expands internationally."
Waldo drew parallels between Warcraft and Webkinz. "While World of Warcraft is changing from a gaming industry to a service industry thanks to the Internet, Webkinz is transforming from a toy company into a gaming and social site company," he said.
After talking about Webkinz and World of Warcraft, Waldo focused on the role of his company Sun Microsystem's Project Darkstar. He argued that although Project Darkstar is often pigeonholed as "a research effort," it employs a lot of computer science-related tactics.
"Like computer science, we've got questions around concurrent programming, reliable systems and dynamic distributed systems," Waldo explained. "All of these have to be solved in a particular genre of programming, which we do."
In the final part of his speech, Waldo introduced the Project Darkstar Developer Challenge, which gives students and independent developers the chance to create applications or utilities for Project Darkstar. One of the prizes is an all-expenses-paid trip to the Game Developers' Conference (GDC), the world's largest gathering of professional video game developers.
Waldo encouraged all audience members to attend the GDC at some point in their lives.
"If you haven't been to the GDC, you should because it's a lot of fun," Waldo said. "It's standard for people with purple hair to whiz by you on rollerblades."
Senior Eddie Aftandilian, a computer science major, was intrigued by what Waldo had to say about Project Darkstar.
"I think it would be a fun project to work on," Aftandilian said. "I think it's interesting because you are applying techniques from one area of computer science to a different area that may not be aware of those techniques."
