http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/publications/files/5599.pdf

World of Warcraft (WoW for short) is the world’s leading MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), captivating over 6 million people around the world.  While many would brush aside WoW or any other online game as a gross waste of time that drags people away from real life friendships and relationships, Nicholas Yee and others at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab say otherwise.  In the paper ““Alone Together?” Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” Yee and others explore the social intricacies and hierarchies of World of Warcraft.  The key to WoW’s success does not lay in its character development and monster slaying aspects, but rather in the human to human interactions its players experience.  The game coaxes interactive game play by offering incentives and rewards that can only be achieved by teaming up with your fellow players.  These rewards however, are not limited to vast amounts of gold and new more powerful swords and wands.  Players are persuaded to build up their own reputation among others.  Every WoW player remembers the name of that one person who, without any compensation, helped them do a quest they were too low level to do themselves, or the rich high level player who handed out items and money to beginners.  In fact Ducheneaut and Yee argue that such reputation building acts are in fact the ultimate keys to success in WoW.

Throughout the game, though mainly when players reach maximum levels (now capped at 70), players join organizations known as guilds.  Guilds are unique with respect to their hierarchy, style, or even goals (player version player as opposed to player versus environment).  Most serious Warcraft players strive to accomplish the games most difficult tasks, and these tasks can only be completed by joining a powerful and well organized guild.  Ducheneaut and Yee explain how guilds function like any other “real life” social networks.  Skeptics may argue that there is not much real social interaction between players as they can only type messages to each other through WoW’s chat features, however this cannot be any farther from the truth.  Every organized guild owns a channel in one of the many large scale proprietary Voice over IP programs such as Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, in which all guild members can communicate with each other live just like a large telephone conference.  It is only through structure, discipline and above all, teamwork and cooperation that WoW’s most challenging endeavors can be overcome.  While many people still believe there is nothing more to WoW then wasted money and a destroyed social life, Ducheneaut and Yee show that there is clearly more: an intricate social web as delicate as any outside Azeroth.