Hunched at a computer in his darkened basement, basking in the blue glow of the screen, he settles in for another night of navigating his level 73 Orc across the land of Azeroth. He’s distracted at work and hasn’t seen his friends in weeks, but damn it if he’s not going to get that Orc to Level 80. Relationships are unimportant, sleep is for the weak, and any meal that takes more time to prepare than a frozen pizza is just not worth the effort.
Right? Maybe not.
In the past five years, World of Warcraft has quickly become the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, with more than eight million users worldwide. But the stereotype many hold about the typical World of Warcraft gamer may not be real at all. Forget everything you learned about World of Warcraft from South Park. The reality of this unreal world may be more positive than you think.
“People spend countless hours playing and they don’t eat and they neglect their children, relationships fall apart,” says Moses Wolfenstein, a UW-Madison doctoral candidate, laughing about the common impression people have of those who play the game. “Yeah, these things do happen. But they’re not common.”
According to both players and researchers of the game, World of Warcraft provides players with real life social benefits. (Yes, that’s right – real life.)
Wolfenstein, whose dissertation research focuses on leadership and learning opportunities in the game, likens the online community in World of Warcraft to an online dating site.
In the game, he says, it’s entirely possible to meet “people who you would never meet by going out to a bar, or people who might be like you but who just don’t happen to be in your social network, so you just wouldn’t have an opportunity to connect with them.”
Launched in 2004, the first edition of the game, which is now known as “vanilla WoW,” offered 60 levels of gameplay on two different continents in the world of Azeroth.
The first expansion pack, “The Burning Crusade,” opened up a new continent and another ten levels of game play. The second expansion pack, “Wrath of the Lich King,” opened yet another continent and advanced the game to level 80, with increasingly difficult challenges for players to overcome. According to Blizzard Entertainment Inc., the creators of the game, “Wrath of the Lich King” sold 2.8 million copies on the first day of its release.
“When you’re hanging out with five or 10 people online and you’re slaying dragons and fighting the forces of the undead and whatnot, it’s kind of this really nice juxtaposition of this outlandish fantasy activity and this soft social space,” Wolfenstein says.
Much of World of Warcraft revolves around combat, whether it’s destroying monsters, fighting other players or participating in a 25-player raid to take control of a dungeon from its evil master.
However, the violent nature of the game is offset by its strikingly beautiful visuals. Each of the four continents in Azeroth include different zones, each with its own distinct landscape and climate. As they move through each zone, players can climb over snow-covered mountains or meander through rainforests and under glimmering pink and purple trees that don’t look at all like they belong in what WoW player and researcher Barbara Z. Johnson calls a “fantasy Tolkien-esque hack-slash game.”
“In the dead of winter, I actually just like going into some of the regions and walking around because they’re beautiful,” says Johnson, a graduate teaching assistant in the education department at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
The zones, or regions, also change with the season, and each change brings another festive seasonal event for players in the world to enjoy. In addition to seasonal celebrations like BrewFest and Winter Vale, Johnson describes a carnival that occurs in Azeroth several times a year.
[1]A Rogue flying on a Hippogryph through Ashenvale, en route to Azshara. Click on the screenshot to view gallery of World of Warcraft screenshots.
“It’s just this real carnival atmosphere,” she explains. “You go play games, do rides, eat strange foods and throw up.”
In the picturesque land of Azeroth, two opposing factions—Horde and Alliance—compete for power. When creating a character, players must side with one of these factions. Players must also choose a race, a class and a profession for their character.
A resulting character, for example, would be a Horde Orc Warrior who works as a blacksmith. Players also customize the skin color, facial features, hairstyle and hair color of their character. Each character has its own specific skill set that plays off of the strengths and weaknesses of other characters.
Increasingly powerful weapons and armor become available as players advance their characters through different levels. In addition, characters can essentially hop on the back of a flying creature as a form of transportation, which is much faster than hoofing it and much more scenic than zapping through a portal.
George Henze, an academic adviser at UW-Richland Center, used to play WoW with a group of friends and now enjoys meeting new people online. He says the most intriguing aspect of the game to him is the character development, adding he tried to learn about the different types of characters and the narrative story rather than advancing quickly through the levels.
Perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of World of Warcraft is its players’ ability to construct their own unique experiences based on their individual interests within the game. Players can choose to test their strength in the battlegrounds, advance their character through the content by completing quests, or just wander through Azeroth solo.
It may seem quite complicated, but players can also join guilds to help guide them along the way. A guild is a community within the game where players work together to achieve certain tasks.
“There is a social component to playing, then having an established group of people you know when you log in adds to that,” says Mike Schmierbach, an assistant professor at Penn State University.
Some guilds are more competitive than others—some even require an application process—but either way, the guild structure enhances camaraderie between players.
“They’re playing together and rubbing virtual elbows beside each other, night after night or a couple of times a week, and so people start to get to know each other,” says Elizabeth King, a doctoral candidate in UW-Madison’s educational communications and technology program.
However, the guild structure adds another layer of social obligation to the game.
“There’s the social pressure of guilds, which is both the best and the worst thing about the game,” Wolfenstein says.
“A lot of people who are in guilds feel like they need to help the guilds,” Schmierbach adds.
Henze recalls a time the rest of his guild convinced him to stay online and complete a raid, a process that can take up to eight hours in the more advanced levels of the game.
“Once you start them, you don’t get the reward unless you stay for the whole thing. When you have to get up for work the next morning, staying up ‘til two in the morning waiting for a raid to finish just isn’t real smart,” Henze laughs.
While guilds provide players with opportunities to socialize within the game, World of Warcraft connects players outside of the game, as well. People who play World of Warcraft are not necessarily antisocial loners who lock themselves up in their basements for weeks every time Blizzard releases a new expansion pack. In fact, Wolfenstein says he knows guilds that hold monthly barbeques.
“Making enduring friendships that often will go out of the game or will go into other games as a space for play is a huge factor,” Wolfenstein says.
Many gamers play not for the online social benefits, but to keep in touch with friends who live thousands of miles away. It’s better than a phone call, Wolfenstein says, because you are actually doing something together.
“The opportunity to connect with people that you already know, and to spend that time, that shared activity together, is definitely huge,” he says.Henze actually spent a weekend in Ohio visiting a group of friends that he met online while playing World of Warcraft with his buddies from Wisconsin.
Maybe more surprising, however, is the game’s appeal for families.
King started playing as a requirement for a class and soon began playing with her son, who was 10 years old at the time.
“My son became really excited about the game and he started playing, and pretty soon my son and I were kind of holed up playing together most nights. My husband was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute! What are you guys doing? I want to play, too!’” she says. “Before we knew it, we were gaming with my brother, who I had previously been out of contact with.”
Johnson began playing WoW with her daughter and husband when her daughter was a teenager.
“Especially those teenage years, you don’t always have something to talk about,” she says. “So that was the key that held us together.”
Johnson also used the game to keep in touch with her family when she moved to Wisconsin by herself for a year for research.
“We would literally be in World together, on voice chat talking about all the stuff that you would normally talk about, while we’re shooting diseased bears,” she laughs.
“I’ve got to say that that’s particularly awesome because usually it’s impossible for parents to find something to do with their adolescent kid,” Wolfenstein says of families who game together. “Being able to get online with your teenager and do something that all of you are enjoying, that’s pretty cool.”
Obviously, though, the social benefits players receive depend on how they use or abuse the technology.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s inherently good or inherently bad,” Schmierbach says. “It kind of depends on how you play and how much you play and who you’re playing with.”
Henze puts it more bluntly.
“Too much of anything can be bad, you know?” he says. “Water’s good for you, but if you drink five gallons of it in an hour, it’ll kill you.”
If there’s any one reason why WoW catches a lot of flak, it’s the amount of time gameplay can consume.
Remember that Horde Orc Warrior? The player controlling that Orc invested more than 100 days of playing time in that character, while still playing with about 10 alternative characters. Because the game is so time-consuming, its players have garnered a cultish, fanatical reputation.
“I think some people think it’s bad because there are guys who come home from work at six and play World of Warcraft until midnight,” says Jeff Thorne, a UW-Madison senior majoring in business, who plays WoW to keep in touch with friends from high school. He says playing the game is really not as weird as people think.
According to King, World of Warcraft is not only interactive, it’s also intellectually stimulating.
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“The challenge involved in this game is amazing,” she says. “It’s not something you can just sit down and button mash your way through.”
A certain amount of intensity and commitment to World of Warcraft can pay off in the workplace, as well.
“These people work hard. There’s no doubt,” Wolfenstein says of guild leaders.
“Whether or not it actually is giving them skills, it certainly builds their level of efficacy.”
“We do know of a few people who—I mean literally—have gotten jobs in business because they have run extremely good guilds and have been recognized for being good guild leaders,” Johnson says.
She says she sees similarities between the struggles of guild leaders in World of Warcraft and leaders in the workplace.
“I think anybody who wants to get their MBA or thinks they want to start a small business should probably play World of Warcraft and be a guild leader,” Johnson says.
“This is totally sexy,” Wolfenstein says. “You can see why the corporate world is interested in this, right?”
In the end, though, the social benefits and consequences of World of Warcraft are as ever-changing and as complicated as the content of the game itself.
“The more you learn about the game, the more you realize that your preconceived notions really fail you,” King says.
“It’s a little bit like a slot machine,” Schmierbach says. “You never quite know what you are going to get.”