The Wiki World of Warcraft

Annie Marie-Schleiner's "Parasitic Interventions" article makes an interesting point of conclusion.

Online massively multi-player RPG's (Role Playing Games) like Ultima Online and Everquest are one gaming enclave ripe for future culture hacking... Opening up the source code of RPG's to hacking and to allow game editors to be developed for popular usage would enrich the experience of inhabiting the game world allowing player to "interface" with their surroundings rather than inhabiting an environment preordained by dungeon masters/ deities. - Page 9.

In other words, Marie-Schleiner is interested in editable Worlds of Warcraft, MMORPG's with the potential to be modified, distributed and reconstructed to account for the considerations of the players. Her suggestion, characterized by the phrase "ripe for future culture hacking,"(my emphasis) acknowledge that this has yet to take place. Instead, RPG's remain aloof from cultural open sourcing and game mod paradigms that have become standard in gaming, as they are controlled by "dungeon masters/ deities." People whose status is attached to their current power and control in the world of MMORPG's.

I think that Maria-Schleiner's observation is a fair one. Indeed, RPG's remain notably outside of the game mod phenomena. But there are also obvious reasons for this, relating to the nature of the RPG and especially the MMORPG, which must be engaged with.

Why can't we wiki the World of Warcraft? Because the game is not about missions, landscapes, or avatar modification, that conventionally form the nature of things modified by game hackers and cultural remixers. Marie-Schleiner for example, traces the way Doom, Quake and Marathon have been open game sourced and modified. Where these games set up a limited number of 'official' missions, levels, and game experiences, modifications extend the game, creating new spaces to play once the old ones have been exhausted.

World of Warcraft, or Ultima Online and Everquest as Marie-Schleiner cites, are fundamentally a different type of game. They are a game world, whose coherence as a reality requires a sort of cross game fidelity that First Person Shooters and narrative games do not. Unlike narrative games, MMORPG's are non-linear and are designed to feel limitless. They are open spaces for exploration, which is notably different that the closed track gameplay of narrative games that allow little latitude in how levels are cleared.

RPG's like WOW, Ultima, and Everquest, also feature other human players, interfacing between multiple individuals where narrative/conventional games only allowed the negotiation of an individual to a pre-programmed space. As a result, there is a practical consideration for the exclusion of modifications. Namely, how can individuals negotiate with one another when the protocols through which they act, play, and communicate are open for constant individual editing. Like pick-up games of football, MMORPG's require the adoption of local rules, standards among players that will allow everyone to compete fairly. Ironically, while Marie-Schleiner argues that allowing individual mods of MMORPG's would allows for "the enrichment" of RPG's, only the opposite seems true. That ability of individuals to freely edit their world would compromise and destroy the richness of that gaming reality. Marie-Schleiner notes that these games have "immersive worlds complete with their own economies of exchange" but does not consider what these very real economies require, namely, fidelity and restrictions to modification. Consider this CNET article that engages with how online economies develop as a result of trust in the stable value of certain goods, services, and forms of currency employed in online spaces. Without such fidelity, the worlds would devolve into anarchies and not the type of utopias that Marie-Schleiner seems to attach to realms of free and easy modification.