World of Warcraft has over 10 million active subscribers. Of those 10 million, there are a substantial amount that participate in guild life. They run raids, field arena teams, farm for mats, etc. And, they also have guild meetings every now and then. However, on May 9, there will be a different kind of meeting taking place in WoW. For the first time ever, there will be a scientific conference held in Azeroth. Yeah, you read right . . . forget flying out to Paris or Los Angelas--this conference is in WoW.
The conference will focus on the convergence between virtual worlds and the real world. Topics include how to research virtual worlds, relationships between virtual worlds and the real world, and what the future has in store for virtual worlds.
The fact that these people have decided to host a conference in WoW is a testament to just how much WoW has diffused into the culture today. The funny thing is, this is by no means the first time that academia has intersected with WoW. Simply going onto Google Scholar and searching for "Warcraft" will return plenty of papers that have already been written about WoW and other games (not too surprisingly, a lot of those papers turn out to be glorified troll forum posts however). As WoW (and other video games) grows in popularity, it'll be interesting to see how the real world (and the academic world) will adapt to them.
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