Over at GameSetWatch there's a column about "The World behind World of Warcraft". Social behavior, loot and its importance and also why people keep playing WoW and why they want to are some of the topics covered.
World of Warcraft has spawned at least two books of published essays. One of them has an entire chapter on the most mundane of the most mundane--fishing. World of Warcraft spawns entire blogs and sites that are dedicated to the many, many corners of WoW. To the experienced gamer, games have the ability to be an entirely different experience from person to person.
To the beginning gamer who plays WoW as one of his first games, this is understood quickly instead of gradually. This leads to an opportunity for intelligent observation, the scale of which equals insight into an entire country. Take a comment from a non-official WoW forum: "At 70, you can choose from one of three factions: Raider, PVP, and Casual. You then blame the other two factions for 'ruining the game.'"
Only in an MMO that is as large as World of Warcraft is it made clearly apparent that there are all kinds of players (people) and that video games can be a setting for social interaction, larger than life. You can meet another player and that player can feel, unlike the ones you regularly play with, like someone from another country, another world, another clique.
Many might find themselves in a state of déjà vu, since there are a thousand different articles out there which cover similar topics, however this is also interesting to quite a few – read it with an open mind and apply your own point of view and it should prove interesting. At least I hope so.
You may read Michael Walbridge's full column here.
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