That was good and I’m glad he gave the talk. There was a point near the start where it got a little off-key (are we clear that “virtual” sexual harassment in a sport game is different in kind to virtual murder in a war game?), but I hope people stick with it to the end.
I thought the point was especially well-made that people gravitate to virtual worlds because they want to be someone different, and that mental health is right spang at the heart of it, even for participants who don’t “have mental health problems”. That’s worth talking about a lot, especially when you recognise that Facebook is a virtual world, albeit one with a dourly single-minded focus on players’ offline identities.
One thing I do wonder is to what extent he’s right to say that developers repeating these mistakes are genuinely doing so by accident. I believe that Blizzard genuinely doesn’t want WoW to smell like the locker room of a boys’ prison; I’m not sure I would assume the same of every Xbox title.
