A Serious Gamer for the Obama Team

We have heard consistently that an Obama administration will most likely embrace information technology ore than any previous one -- and by the looks of it, could be much more techie.

President-elect Barack Obama picked two academics to co-chair his transition team for the Federal Communications Commission. While the professors -- Kevin Werbach, who teaches business, policy, and social implications of emerging Internet and communications technologies at the Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania, and Susan Crawford, who teaches communications and Internet law at the University of Michigan -- are immersed in technology policy, Werbach, it turns out, enjoys online gaming. Rather, he plays the massively multiplayer online role-playing game ( MMORG , in the vernacular) World of Warcraft , according to an article posted by Gigaom.com.

As Gigaom reports, Werbach described his interest in World of Warcraft, or WoW, on his blog in a 2006 post:

It has been a rewarding experience, going far beyond the entertainment value.

Now, I'm not kidding myself. I play Warcraft because it's fun. It's taking time away from watching TV, reading books, and other entertainment pursuits. But I'm also playing because I believe MMOGs will be one of the primary forms of social software for the next decade. Defined broadly, they may become the dominant form of social software. And you can't understand games without experiencing them first-hand.

But don't think Werbach is all about gaming. He used to edit Release 1.0, a publication "that provides leading-edge analysis of key technology trends for senior executives," according to his bio page on his blog , and he has worked with "technology industry guru Esther Dyson," and he is familiar with the FCC, having served as counsel for new technology policy.

We've asked Tech Insider blogger Anne Laurent , who writes here and on her The Agile Mind blog about how online gaming may soon influence policy making, to weigh in. Stay tuned.