yet another insight from The Plenitude:

When describing a process of creating called Colonization
(i.e. find the unowned, repackage it and sell it), the author
described how the game of baseball got “colonized”.

His description inspired me to create what I call
the 5 stages of gaming abstraction.

1) Direct play (F2F)
This is where all games start, be it a game of stickball
or the dice rolling, physical character moving version of Warcraft
played on kitchen tables.

2) Observing play directly
This next stage has a larger degree of variance :
at one level, it could be a Little League game
or merely watching Warcraft being played at a game store.
At another level it would be watching professional players
play baseball at a stadium.

3) Mediated observation of play
This is the most abstracted level of play.
An example would be watching a professional team on TV
with commentators explaining the play, along with
the obligatory commercials and vendor promos.
Professional gaming, while not at MLB or NASCAR levels,
is out there and in some nations (not ours) prevalent.

4) Directly playing metadata
This would be the “Fantasy League” style of play.
We have Fantasy Baseball, Football, Hockey, etc.,
but I haven’t seen a Fantasy Warcraft, though -
perhaps when professional Warcrafting takes off…

5) Direct play (interactive)
Examples of this would be Madden [insert year name here](Football),
NHL [insert year name here] (Hockey), etc.

This is where World of Warcraft would be in relation to
kitchen table Warcraft.

But it’s not quite that easy – stage 5 could be construed
as a new stage 1, which would restart the cycle,
and these stages are cyclical.

That being said, please, oh please GOD,
let there not be a World of World of Warcraft