The titles are starting to annoy even me.

Anyways, Blizzard announced this week the details for their main event, Blizzcon 2010.  For the uninitiated, Blizzcon is the yearly event where Blizzard announces what new developments they have planned for their various games.  It is also an excuse for Blizzard's designers to meet their consumers, for consumers to ask the designers questions, and for the costume contest!

This always makes me laugh.

I WAS going to discuss PR type activities that players use to communicate with other gamers, but recently a TED talk has popped up that makes a great argument.  Before I link it, you should be aware that many people who play online games will forego TV watching in favor of the online gaming experience.  Personally, I don't even have cable.  When I watch television, it is background noise to playing WoW with my significant other.

With this talk, Jane McGonigal argues that online gaming can save the world. At the beginning of the talk you can hear people giggling at her claims, but at the end she gets a standing ovation.

Why should I not share links?  For example this link illustrates the community that has been fostered by a class. This one does as well! Now I just need a catchy title to file it under.

In a recent interview I had with Dr. Cicchirillo, a professor of communication in the department of Advertising who focuses on video game play features and contexts on post-game play outcomes, we spoke mainly of video games as relating to advertising. However, he did lead me to someone who studies the motivation behind gamers.


Nick Yee is a research scientist at the Palo Alto research center, and since the fall of 1999, he has surveyed around 35,000 gamers to deconstruct and study their behaviors. His website, the Dadelus gateway, is a collection of his findings. For today’s post I want to study what motivates gamers.

Nick Yee (His name is one of those that just flows so well, I can’t help but say it altogether!) divides motivation for gaming into four broad categories: achievements, social appeal, immersion, and competition. He argues that what is thought of as one game is actually several games being played side by side, and I agree with this. Too often, I see people (raiding people’s, usually) who see the entire game as end-game raiding. Leveling is simply a means to an end, dailies and guilds are also a means to an end. There are some people that try to raid entire instances alone.  It should be noted that some people enjoy exploring every nook and cranny of Azeroth, some enjoy cornering markets, and some enjoy making friends. 
For me, I feel like I mix three out of four of the motivations. My favorite part of the game is indubitably the social aspect. Most of the time I spend online is spent talking to other guild members, to other tree druids I already know, and even talking to random people via /trade chat. I also enjoy the thrill of a first time boss kill, however, if I was forced into introspection I would say that is because I am the one who organized the raid. I have been recruiting people for two years, I have been refining loot systems and the fairest way to decide attendance, and when all of that comes together in a perfectly executed boss kill, it is a great achievement for me.

However, I know people who play for different reasons. For example, my boyfriend Andrew plays to fulfill the competition motivation. He likes to log on just for raids, or to complete a goal that will bolster his dps (damage per second) performance. Besides that he likes to play to amass large amounts of money, which is also a competition against other buyers and sellers in the virtual marketplace. Another example is Secondaidkit, a priest in my guild. I can tell he is motivated by the achievement system, because he has spent a large amount of time completing the Insane in the Membrane achievement, which requires spending a large amount of time grinding rep for little known factions. The amazing part is this achievement has no tangible reward besides a title, he has nothing to show for it besides “I completed this incredibly hard achievement, just because I can.”

Yee also divided those broad categories into smaller categories, and was even so kind to express them in chart form!

If you would like, you can also take Nick Yee's motivation assesment.  Here were my results: "The graph above is a visualization of your three main motivation components. Your Achievement percentile rank is 86%. Your Socializing percentile rank is 88percent. And your Immersion percentile rank is 34 percent. "




So does this system cover all of the aspects of motivation? Are there any you do not see listed that you think should?

Edit: RIGHT after I published this, I saw that Nick Yee is conducting another survey.

For my second post I wanted to try and be a bit more scientific. I am sure that everyone likes to hear me pontificate (great word, I feel like I should use it more) and ramble.  Occasionaly I think maybe I should interview someone who actually researches these subjects. For my first interview I went local and interviewed Dr. Cicchirillo, a professor of communication in the department of Advertising who focuses on video game play features and contexts on post-game play outcomes. Since I am flustered easily, I forgot to hit record on my netbook and therefore do not have very many specific quotes. Let’s call this a “conversation” instead.


Dr. Cicchirillo recently finished his first major study which concentrated on race perceptions in video games. Specifically, he let subjects play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and watched how they reacted with characters of different races. The results showed that people were more likely to feel aggression to people of different races in a solo video game. Though when I asked if he had done any research into MMORPG’s I learned that not many people are studying MMORPG’s from an advertising perspective, the emphasis is on regular video games.

After we talked of his initial research, we started talking about online gaming enviroments and MMORPG’s and I learned a few interesting theories. Notably, why people socialize. He told me about the uncertainty reduction theory, which is a defense mechanism. Basically, you will tell someone information about yourself in hopes of reciprocation, this in turn reduces the uncertainty about that person, and reduces stress you feel about that interaction. However, anonymity can blur this by confusion about gender, race, and even what culture they belong to. Anyone can lie in a video game.

However, the advertising department is very interested in how video games can be used to advertise. While this is a new field, there have been several notable forays into advertising in online games. During the last presidential campaign, President Obama’s worked with Massive gaming to release advertisments in a popular Xbox Live racing game. While these ads were only visible during online play and did not last as long as a permanent item. According to Massive’s web site, they see large increases in recognition to advertisers in controlled studies.

However, that type of advertising would probably not do well in an enviroment like World of Warcraft, where escapism is the buzzword. While I personally think the Farmer’s Insurance Sword of Destruction would be fun to tout in dalaran, it would take away from the playstyle for the populous at large. According to Dr. Cicchirillo, the word for advertising conforming to the tenets of the video game it inhabits is called congruency. For ads that do not detract from the realism, but instead add to the realism, it will have a positive effect and promote a greater sense of recall.

While my interview with Dr. Cicchirillo was not strictly concerning public relations in WoW, I still feel like I gleaned some very useful information.

I have been assigned to blog about something. While this will be graded for the first five posts, I hope to continue with this blog if I enjoy it. But for my first post, I want to layout the intent of the blog. This will, primarily, be a World of Warcraft blog. I have played for about four years now and find the entire process fascinating.

A few years back, most people who played online video games were written off as a person who lives in their parents’ basement and had few to no social skills. And the nice thing is once a stereotype is established; it’s hard to change that perception. However, this niche has grown surprisingly while everyone had their backs turned. World of Warcraft now has 11.5 million subscribers! To put that in perspective, the United States has 305 million people. That would mean (if the figures were constrained to the U.S., which they are not) that 1 out of every 28 people plays this single game. This is a huge market that is still a large unknown for many fields because of the past perceptions.

On top of the sheer numbers of people playing, there is also a great passion for this game and the social networks it fosters. There are several news websites devoted strictly to news about World of Warcraft. On top of professional news sites, there are absolutely hundreds of blogs about World of Warcraft in general, blogs dedicated to the specific classes in WoW, and even weekly podcasts that bring in prominent members of the World of Warcraft community for interviews. And the most interesting part of all? Every single one of those sites is completely fan operated. Blizzard has not spent a dime to have a following that rivals rabid Apple fans.

The first question should be what creates this love of a grouping of pixels? I would say the answer has to be the social aspect of the game. Again, the norm is to assume that MMORPG’s are filled with social rejects, but there is a significant portion of our population that enjoys this medium as a way to relax and unwind; and they are perfectly normal. There is a portion of people who feel real connections to people they will possibly never meet in real life. I myself have a large number of people that I can easily call my friends who I have met over WoW. (There are still a lot more too!) I have met people who work as mathematicians for NASA, people who own their own businesses, college students, blue collar workers, doctoral students, and professors with doctorates, and people who are unemployed. I have learned how to tell a Brazilian dialect from other Latin American dialects, I have learned how one person’s negativity affects large groups of people, I have learned how to code HTML, and I got step by step instructions on how to calculate a confidence interval. I can easily say that this is a medium which encompasses an incredibly wide range of people. And yet most of the population seems to not realize this phenomenon.

As a student of PR and an avid WoW player, I see a lot of new areas that could be developed from this niche.

My purpose here is to try and explore the field of MMORPG’s in relation to the practice of Public Relations. I will make a distinction between the techniques used by Activision/ Blizzard and even try and focus on how your average guild tries to use PR to its advantage. And while I will be using terms foreign to people who do not play MMORPG’s, I will try and make it easy for any reader to understand.
Wish me luck!