World of Warcraft
From GameLabWiki
Everyone wants to be a hero! Hardly any other game made this possible to the extent that World of Warcraft did. With 14 million copies sold, making it one of the top 5 best-selling pc-games, WoW still has an enormous market power 16 years after its release and is an excellent object for analyses in the field of Game Studies.
About the Game
World of Warcraft is a subscription based Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game ( MMORPG ), created by Blizzard Entertainment and published in 2004.
Seven addons have been released for WoW to date. And with every addon there has been huge changes to the world, the mechanics and the content of the game.
The addons are:
The Burning Crusade ( 2007 )
Wrath of the Lich King ( 2008 )
Cataclysm ( 2010 )
Mists of Pandaria ( 2012 )
Warlords of Draenor ( 2014 )
Legion ( 2016 )
Battle for Azeroth ( 2018 )
Shadowlands ( presumably 2020 )
In 2019 WoW Classic was released as an official version of the original game at the time of its release in 2004.As you can see in the following trailer, all changes that came along with the addons were reset.
World of Warcraft changed a lot throughout the years. Therefore WoW is a good research object for many scientific disciplines and theories in the Computer Games Research.
Research-relevant Contents of the Game
A big success factor, but at the same time also a point of criticism, for WoW is the strong immersion on the player. Various elements that cause this immersion are of scientific importance.
These are:
Narrative Elements
The typical role-playing experience of an epic story. The narration revolves around the history of two alliances and their conflicts. In addition, WoW contains many references to real events. These don't disturb the immersion, they are even demanded by the community. But the strong focus on narration is at the same time a factor that can disturb immersion. If there are gaps in the story or if it doesn't seem conclusive, this can contribute to a negative gaming experience.
Spatial immersion
The player repeatedly arrives at places that remain in his memory afterwards. In addition, emotions are increasingly linked to what has been experienced. This creates an identification with the game world. Although the graphics were always a bit worse than in comparable games, WoW created enough locations that every player will remember. Blizzard is well aware of this, so they put this element in the WoW Classic trailer linked above and showed a dwarf hunter at the gates of Ironforge. This scene was also used in the original trailer for the 2004 Vanilla-Release and is part of the history of computer games.
Social experience
The player joins groups, plays with friends, works with other players in a guild, or regularly meets other players, already known to him, in the capitals. So everyone who has played or is playing WoW can tell their own stories. Many friendships and relationships were formed in the game and continued in real life.
It's also interesting how the behaviour of the players has changed over the years. A lot of new content led to the fact that players started to behave differently. While in the beginning it was important to get a good reputation on the chosen server, this didn't play a big role later on. Server borders were weakened or completely abolished and elements like the dungeon browser made it possible to enter a 5 player dungeon automatically without having to gather a group before.
Competitive play
Whether it's through the integrated achievement system, gaining rare items, or defeating strong bosses in dungeons and other players in arena battles, WoW has many factors that challenge the ambition of the player. But at the same time this was always a big criticism of WoW. Many players became addicted, this is especially the case within the player base of the best guilds for each server. Competitive play is by nature and specifically in wow always accompanied by a large expenditure of time.
Player driven economy
That is present everywhere in the game. The virtually acquired ownership of a player and his avatar can be converted into real currencies. This not only makes a player famous in the game, it also makes it difficult for him to simply let this property rest. This is also described under the workification segment on this page.
These are just a few important factors. A complete listing is certainly not possible, because the game experience is always perceived subjectively differently.[1]
Related Research Approaches
Competitive Gaming
The competitive gaming in WoW is separated into PvP ( Player versus Player ) and PvE ( Player versus Environment ).
Progress Guilds are known to be the first to reach the goal to master the final boss encounter as soon as new PvE Content is released to the game. So everytime a new Content gets released there is a race with guilds all around the world about who gets the world first kill of the final boss.
There are also Player versus Player Matches in the so called Arena. The best Player for each Arena Season is determined live on stage at a major event, the Blizzcon ( Blizzards in-house exhibition ). This is a completely different kind of gaming experience. Players are forced to adapt their characters and tactics to the new challenges of a human opponent.
Serious Games
The game is often used to explore the effect of the game on the player, because it is good for observing the player while playing. The right approach to researching the effect of a game is a much discussed point in Game Studies. The complexity that WoW has reached in the long history of its continuous development allows a versatile use as a serious game.
For example, WoW was used as a simulation for diseases when the so-called "Corrupted blood incident" occurred. This was a disease that players could get from a boss in an instance and finally died from that disease within the instance. However, it was also possible for non-player companions to get the disease and carry it out of the instance. This spread the disease all over the world of warcraft and killed most of the players at least once. Epidemiologists were mainly interested in the ways the disease spread, but also in the behaviour of infected players. At the beginning, the spread of the disease was unintentional, but little by little more players became infected on purpose and spread the disease as far as possible.
Workification
This player driven economy contains also elements of workification. Many players are forced to farm for gold or "grind" the late game content to get better equipment. It is also quite common to outsource this work to other players. There are professionell players, mainly in China, who will grind these items or level your character for Real-Life-Currency. On a smaller scale, Players share their tasks with friends and other members inside their guild to progress faster as a group.
One central element for the economy in WoW is the auction house. It is possible to survive inside the game as a professional trader. But due to the accumulation of large amounts of gold, a black market developed in which players could trade in game currency for real money. Blizzard tried to stop this in many ways, but most of the time they failed. This circumstance led to the introduction of the WoW-Token. This could be purchased for real money and then exchanged in game. By redeeming this token the player received one month of game time for his account. The tokens always had a real value, the price of a monthly subscription.
With the release of Diablo 3, they tried to control the external black market themselves by introducing a real money auction house where players could exchange virtual goods for real money.
Links
- ↑ Die Welt hinter dem Bildschirm – virtuelle Erlebniswelt World of Warcraft: Eine Analyse des Spielerlebens und der Wechselwirkungen zwischen Spieler, Avatar, Spielwelt und Realität, Astrid Koblmüller, Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010