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!