... would join up. He expects the guild to be a place where non-WoW tools can be created, largely as a result of its members' technology expertise.
"I've got a couple of developers now in my lab working on setting up collaboration tools," he said, "and I'm going to set up our guild as a test bed for that."
Some members of the guild think WoW provides a rare atmosphere where like-minded people can come together to talk high-level technology some of the time, then run off to kill virtual monsters when they get bored. That even applies to players who aren't hardcore gamers.
"I definitely wasn't a gamer at all," said Bonner, who began playing WoW and joined We Know because of Ito. "It was like, 'You have to come play, you have to come play, you have to come play.' I finally went and played and it was so much cooler instantly than I thought it was going to be that I got hooked right away."
Bonner says he simply couldn't resist joining a guild like We Know. "I think that the combination of the game and the people that I'm playing it with makes it very, very attractive," he said. "I can throw out a blog idea that I'm talking about to people who would actually know what I'm talking about while I'm running around hunting orcs or something."
Of course, not every potentially valuable business contact that "We Know" members make happens within the guild. Mayfield said he recently started a potential deal with someone he had previously met rampaging around in WoW.
"I met [up with] him in WoW and we ran the stockades, which is a dungeon, together," Mayfield said, "and then at some point we were whispering a little bit between each other (in WoW) and today we had a call about how to provide a solution for him."
In any case, despite the fact that We Know has all kinds of members, to Ito the guild is a refuge for his high-powered buddies. Is it far-fetched to believe the next big thing may get its start while online pals cooperate in their virtual conquests?
"Most of the time, we're talking about things that are more social, or talking about the game, and the game is really more of a social bonding experience," Ito said. "There are a lot of people making connections and talking about working with each other or bringing in their friends from work."
