Investigative Essay about the game World of Warcraft

Running head: WORLD OF WARCRAFT1
World of Warcraft (WoW): Gaming Identity & Gamification Design
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World of Warcraft (WoW): Gaming Identity & Gamification Design


I. Background
The online worlds are increasingly blurring lines between what is "real" and what is "virtual." online users, particularly gamers, are immersed in worlds of varying degrees of social, psychological, and mental engagement. The motivations for players in games, particularly massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs), are just as varied as players are. In contrast to more conventional games, offline and pre-programmed to a certain elementary level, MMOGs are open platforms engaging players in diverse possibilities of group commitments, personal enactments, and game domestication for unintended purposes and uses. The act of playing is, of course, as old as humanity is. For one, a group of early humans would engage in gaming activities not particularly dissimilar to current games. The major departure MMOGs offer compared to any gaming activities any given set of players has engaged in centers on a notion of virtuality. That is, in current gaming offerings, players assume different identities not so much as in conventional games in one context or a layer yet as multi-layers of identities informed by ever-changing motivations and purposes for play and personal/group engagement. In World of Warcraft (WoW), a worldwide popular MMOG, players are engaged in sophisticated worlds of properties, personal/group attachments, and constantly changing strategies to defend or attack one or more guilds. The ever-evolving nature of WoW is a case in point on multiplicity and complexity of player engagement in virtual worlds in order to to achieve, or compensate for, one or more personal/social purposes. Moreover, players of WoW and, for that matter, any similar online game, do not only commit to "game rules" yet also engage in gaming and socialization activities, opening up space for more creative gaming design concepts applicable in
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MMOGs and beyond. The central focus in the current paper is, more specifically, on a sense of community and gamification design potential WoW affords as players engage in different gaming, socialization, and game-adaptation activities. This paper aims, accordingly, to explore socialization motivations in personal and group contexts of engagement, as well as gamification design inspirations players of World of Warcraft afford.
II. Gaming as a Social Practice
Traditionally, gaming, as an ancient human practice, involves one or more forms of identity manipulation. Online identity manipulation assumes, as noted, multiple layers of identities informed by a complex dynamics of motivations and purposes. Typically, socialization stands out in a growing body of research as one most common motivation/purpose players are engaged in WoW. For instance, Gui (2018) argues for a "virtual sense of community" players develop not only playing WoW yet also, more importantly, engaging in a wide range of collaborative storytelling activities in conversations such as "The Darkening Grove Tavern" under World's End Tavern forum. The...