I’m going to get a little meta on everyone, so please bear with me.
What drives us to play World of Warcraft? The people? The challenge? The mechanics? The atmosphere? The loot?
I’ve been playing WoW since day 3 pretty consistently for the past 5 years. There have been multiple breaks from WoW, with a couple of those lasting several months, but I’ve always come back. No other game has held my attention for as long nor has engrossed me as thoroughly. So what is it about World of Warcraft that has accomplished this?
I love the art style of WoW as well as the mechanics. While there are many misguided opinions on the “one button” gameplay of WoW, it really is a blast to play. It’s an MMO with a casual-centric gameplay that allows anyone to go through the game at their own pace. You can level from 1 to the cap all by yourself and that was something that appealed to me coming from Final Fantasy XI.
Grouping was and still is purely optional in WoW. Eventually most players find their way into a guild, usually formed by friends, and the sense of community becomes apparent. I love my guild and friends that I’ve made over the years on Cenarius. Even better is the growing sense of community I’ve obtained with listening to podcasts and becoming friends with many people outside of my home server.
While the community plays a large portion of the staying-power of WoW, I think many of us become hooked because of another aspect of the game: character progression. It’s that carrot dangled in front of our noses driving us to keep playing, to keep obtaining better and better loot. You might think it shallow to simplify things down to obtaining virtual loot, but let’s think about it for a moment.
How many of your in-game friends do you have contact with outside of the game? At some point WoW will be a footnote in our collective gaming history and the friendships we’ve made will probably continue on to the next thing whatever that maybe. If you’re only playing the game for the community, then WoW is nothing more than a fancy chat-room. So while the experience of WoW is more rewarding with friends, I don’t see how it can be the core driving force to keep playing.
Maybe instead of the community, you play for the challenge of the raid-content. There is definitely a sense of accomplishment from the triumph of challenging content and that is definitely a large motivating factor to keep playing. But let’s be honest, if there wasn’t the reward of better loot tied to the downing of bosses, would you still be playing the game?
Now by no means am I trying to suggest that everyone is (still) playing the game solely for loot, but character progression is probably the largest motivating factor across the board for many of us. Maybe this sense of progression is amplified if our real-life progression has slowed down.
Perhaps you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, or maybe you’re happy with where you’re at in life. Either way World of Warcraft satisfies a basic need of progression in our lives, (perhaps too well). You can come home, log in, and feel like you’ve made some progress. It’s a simple reward mechanism that keeps us coming back for more. While for some that progress may very well be in the social-arena of WoW, it’s hard to deny that many of us do it for the loot.
Editors Note: If you’re wondering where the inspiration came for this entry, I have an answer for you. After listening to Joystiq podcast episode 121 Justin McElroy mentioned that the games he often finds motivated to play are those that provide a sense of progression. This resonated with me and I began reflecting on why WoW and MMOs in general hook players for as long and as completely as they do. If you’ve never listened to the Joystiq podcast, I highly recommend that you do so. Do it NOW!
