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Design philosophies in MMOs seem to have seen a shift in recent years. What used to be designs for social dependencies and challenging content seems to have become designs for social independence and casual play. This has not gone by unnoticed by communities of players that have gradually increased in size, hoping to find regression in design philosophies for their favorite games. This study combines the social component of Yee’s (2006) model for motivations for online play with Bradner’s (2001) concept of social affordances, and quantitative surveys with qualitative interviews in order to examine how the social player experience in World of Warcraft has changed in relation to changes made to the game. Some of the findings are that the incentives and necessity for socializing with strangers in the game has generally diminished as a consequence of changes made in the game that focus on practical efficiency. External factors that seems to have played a role in these results are age, technological contexts and life contexts of the respondents.

Vänner möts inte längre bara på fysiska platser utan även online på olika typer av plattformar. Denna studie utforskar var onlinevänner träffas, i vilka aktiviteter de umgås, hur frekvent onlinevännerna umgås samt hur många onlinevänner som även träffas offline. Syftet med studien är att få en större förståelse för var och hur människor möter vänner online. Studien genomfördes med hjälp av en enkätundersökning med 1000 deltagare som spreds via sociala nätverkstjänster och offline, samt genom att analysera tidigare forskning inom relaterade ämnen. Resultatet av studien pekar på att det finns ett stort antal olika plattformar där onlinevänner kan skapas. De vanligaste av dessa är Facebook och World of Warcraft. Främst umgås onlinevänner via textchatt, röstchatt och genom att spela tillsammans. De flesta onlinevänner umgås dagligen och majoriteten av deltagarna träffade 2-5 onlinevänner offline. Studien väckte stort engagemang på sociala medier och kan förhoppningsvis komplettera redan existerande forskning samt bidra med inspiration till framtida studier. / Friends no longer meet only in physical places; they can also meet on various different online platforms. This paper aims to explore where online friends meet, in which activities they socialise, how frequent they socialise and how many online friends also meet each other offline. The purpose of this paper is to get a better understanding of where and how people meet friends online. The paper was realised through a survey with 1000 participants, distributed both on social networking sites and offline. An analysis of already existing related research papers was also made. The result of the survey showed that there are various different platforms where online friends can be made. The most common platforms were Facebook and World of Warcraft. Most online friends socialised via text chat, voice chat and through playing games together. The majority of the online friends kept in touch with each other on a daily basis and met 2-5 online friends offline. The survey was given big attention at social networking sites and hopes to complement already existing research as well as contribute with inspiration to further studies.

The proliferation of the Internet and online-based social interactions has become an increasingly popular topic with communication scholars. The goal of this study was to explore how massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) players make sense of and negotiate their online social interactions. This study (N = 292) examined how players of SecondLife and World of Warcraft evaluated their online relationships compared to their offline relationships and investigated how different levels of realism within different MMORPGs effected player's online experiences. The results indicated that players of SecondLife placed higher values of emotional closeness to their online relationships when compared to players of World of Warcraft and SecondLife was rated more real by its players than World of Warcraft. Results further indicated that players of SecondLife had higher levels of perceived online emotional closeness when compared to perceived offline emotional closeness. Implications of this study focus on developing a bottom up holistic profile of online game players as opposed to the current top down research model.

This paper investigates how players interact in classic and retail World of Warcraft by conducting a participant observation study by joining Pickup Groups (PUGs) to play through dungeons. Chat activity is logged and all messages are categorised into different types depending on what is conveyed in an attempt to see if and how social interactions differ between the games. The results indicate that classic players communicate more, both for instrumental value and for purely social reasons. All players met throughout the classic PUGs interacted to some extent through the chat. Most retail players chose not to interact via chat at all. It is speculated that the varying levels of social interaction are connected to the accessibility of the PUGs and dungeons. Dungeons that required more effort to access and had challenges that required an irregular strategy generally had a higher level of social interaction within them. Groups that established a positive atmosphere through social interaction had players that responded to potentially frustrating events by reassuring the other players in order to uphold this atmosphere. Groups that did not establish such an atmosphere responded with frustration instead in similar situations. / Denna uppsats undersöker hur spelare interagerar i klassiska och moderna World of Warcraft genom att utföra en deltagande observation av “Pickup Groups” (PUGs) i så kallade “dungeons”. Chatt-aktiviteten loggades och alla meddelanden kategoriseras i olika typer beroende på vad som förmedlas i ett försök att se om och hur sociala interaktioner skiljer sig mellan de två versionerna. Resultaten visar att spelare av den klassiska versionen kommunicerar mer, både för instrumentellt värde och av rent sociala skäl. Alla spelare som möttes under de klassiska PUG: erna interagerade till viss del genom chatten. De flesta spelare av den moderna versionen valde att inte interagera via chatten alls. Det spekuleras att de olika nivåerna av social interaktion är kopplat till tillgängligheten av PUG:er och Dungeons. Dungeons som krävde mer ansträngningar för att få tillgång till och hade utmaningar som krävde en annorlunda strategi hade i allmänhet en högre nivå av social interaktion inom sig. Grupper som etablerade en positiv atmosfär genom social interaktion hade spelare som reagerade på potentiellt frustrerande händelser genom att uppmuntra de andra spelarna för att upprätthålla denna atmosfär. Grupper som inte etablerade en sådan atmosfär reagerade istället med frustration i liknande situationer.

This dissertation is about moral cognition and the production of spiritual experiences in the Chinese version of the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (CWoW). Chapter 1 introduces the game, field sites, data collection methods, and the questions and paradigms that structure the dissertation's narrative. This chapter explains that during fieldwork CWoW players frequently described gameplay as yielding positive moral and spiritual experiences. Chapter 2 outlines the cognitive mechanisms – Haidt and Joseph's 'moral foundations' (2004; 2007) – that are hypothesised to inform the in-game experiences to which players attributed moral significance. Chapter 3 argues that some aspects of the WoW gameworld are high in cognitive 'relevance' (following Sperber & Wilson, 1986) for Haidt and Joseph's moral foundations. This relevance yields the game a capacity for cross-cultural appeal. Chapter 4 argues that social agencies operant in the lives of CWoW players motivated players to utilise these morally relevant aspects of gameplay as a 'religion-like tool for group cohesion' (following Sosis & Alcorta, 2008). These extra-game agencies help explain why these aspects of gameplay were cultivated in lieu of, or as superordinate to, aspects that may be 'relevant' to other cognitive mechanisms. Chapter 5 argues that reports of soul merger experiences obtained in CWoW resemble Durkheim’s 'collective effervescence' (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]) and may be understood at the cognitive level as 'flow' (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) experiences conjoined with affective outputs from Haidt and Joseph's moral foundations. Chapter 6 summarises the key points made in the preceding chapters and concludes that in the contexts sampled here, high-contingency aspects of CWoW gameplay may be viewed as Durkheimian religious rituals.

In clinical practice, sufficient attention is paid to the substance dependencies in many respects. Despite being similar to these dependencies, the issue of "activities, behavior, processes" is often left aside. This work deals with online computer games, mostly with the World of Warcraft (WoW), because there are players who may have a problem not only in relation to addictive behavior. The aim of the research was to describe the psychopathological characteristics of MMORPG players and describe the connection between their occurrence and the rate of reported addictive behavior. Participants were MMORPG active players recruited by self-selection based on addressing through online discussion forums, facebook pages and e-mail snowball. The minimum range of subjects was set at 100 players. Tool for gathering data was online questionnaire. The results were determined using descriptive- analytical and mathematical statistics with the help of SPSS software. The final group consists of 243 respondents, of which 216 are men (89%) and 27 women (11%). The age range of the respondents is between 10-56 years, the average age is 22 years. 185 respondents (76%) considered WoW as being their first choice game. Of 243 respondents 23 (it is about 10%) have shown addictive behavior (including 22 men and 1 woman)....

Tidigare studier visar att människor skapar olika uppfattningar runt olika kroppsformer både runt personlighetsdrag och fysiska attribut. Målet med undersökningen är att testa hur uppfattningar runt olika kroppsformer på en kvinnlig karaktär påverkar syn på trovärdighet inom karaktärsklasser i World of Warcraft (2004), då främst klassen präst, samt viljan att spela som karaktären. Detta gjordes genom en intervju med spelare av World of Warcraft (2004) där de fick diskutera samma karaktär med sex olika kroppsformer. Resultaten för undersökningen indikerar att uppfattningar av kroppsform utifrån fysiska attribut spelade en stor roll i deras syn på trovärdighet inom karaktärsklassen präst. De största skillnaderna i uppfattningar runt fysiska attribut och personlighetsdrag kunde ses mellan muskulösa och icke-muskulösa figurer. Skillnad mellan uppfattningar av fysiska attribut kunde även ses mellan smala och överviktiga figurer. Vilken figur deltagarna helst ville spela berodde främst på uppfattad trovärdighet inom karaktärsklassen präst, men även delvis visuella preferenser hos deltagaren.

Popular fantasy is often populated by members of different species, such as dwarves, elves, and orcs. Much of the narrative structure of the genre comes from the interactions and conflicts between these species, with many of them serving as stand ins for real world culture. This has become the underlying fabric of fantasy fiction and has deep resonance in our contemporary pop culture. However, many of these depictions are founded on colonialist constructions of race and otherness, turning the genre into a medium for reproducing racist ideologies, often unconsciously. This thesis examines the origins and trajectory of this trend by looking at one of the most well- known examples of contemporary fantasy: Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

According to a 2009 study, 68% of American households played video games (Entertainment Software Association). With this number continually on the rise, video games and their cultures are in need of further scholarly exploration. A video game of particular interest is a massive online game known as World of Warcraft, drawing over twelve million players worldwide (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010). With a cyberspace-based culture, World of Warcraft exposes its players to phenomenon that are unique to it, and thereby not easily understood through the same measures and evaluations offered by society at large. One such phenomena is that of gender, or more specifically the bending of gender by which players assume characters of the opposite gender. Although a common practice in video games like World of Warcraft, its motivations have yet to receive adequately scholarly attention. The present study seeks to explore the process of gender selection in the massive online game World of Warcraft through qualitative methods utilizing interviews, texts, and field notes. The data is then analyzed using Kellner's (2003) methods of critical analysis of media and Langian's (1975) work on thematization.