Cory Doctorow posted an interesting tidbit on BoingBoing yesterday when he pointed out that there are more people playing WoW than there are farmers in the U.S. According to Doctorow there are ‘four million people in the US play World of Warcraft’, 4 times more than list farming as their primary occupation (according to the U.S. EPA ‘there are only about 960,000 persons claiming farming as their principal occupation’)

In case you have been living in a closet for the past few years, World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massive multiplayer online game that has not only become hugely successful, but managed to make its way into the main stream. In fact the controversial show South Park won an emmy for the episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft”. The show starts off with the following exchange.

Randy (Stan’s Dad) – “You’ve been on your computer all weekend, shouldn’t you go out and socialize with your friends?”

Stan – “I am socializing r-tard, I am logged onto an MMORPG, with people from all over the world and getting XP with party using team speak”

(Thanks to the wonders of the web you can view the episode below if you like)

South Park-World of Warcraft

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As the exchange above highlights, new collaborative media (and yes MMOGs enable collaboration) present different way of thinking about social interaction and collaboration. However, when you talk about ‘mass collaboration’ it doesn’t get any bigger or sophisticated than WoW. Players work together using complex dashboards to track in game stats along with messaging and voice communication to orchestrate their quests.

While it’s easy to write off video games as young and juvenile, perhaps the may be a little more important. As Doctorow points out “Next time President Bush tells you he’s going to Crawford to be with “real Americans,” remind him that there are more World of Warcraft players in the USA than there are farmers (though of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive).”