Marketing Monday is a weekly installment talking about a person, business, or website doing something cool online. If you have an idea, let the BE Blog know!
I recently ran into someone at a local coffee shop who was telling me how he was motivated to reopened his Second Life account. “I’ve been getting gigs to Second Life parties to play my guitar and people actually pay me like $40/hour to do it!” he was saying. Yes, this is a video game character playing the guitar and yes, he is playing for actual US dollars.
As someone who’s never gotten past level three of Super Mario, I was intrigued, and maybe even slightlyjudgmental about people who play computer games like this. I was about to tell my man friend Dan how weird this conversation was when I found out he’s a gamer.Dan has been playing World of Warcraft on and off for three years. I decided to pick his brain about virtual worlds, and how and why they are so popular:
What about WoW makes it more interesting to you than something you’d play on a gaming system (Playstation, Wii, etc.)?
You can’t beat the game so the game has more replay value. There’s always something more you can do, which is motivating.Every two to three years, the developers add on an expansion, raising the maximum level of characters, adding new maps/quests, etc.
There is a group element to the game, encouraging user interaction. When you start playing WoW, you join a guild. The guild has their own chat, and there are options for guilds to get together and help each other out. You can talk to people individually or in a group format.
Also, it’s reasonably priced at $15/month. Let’s say you play 20 days out of the month, that translates to less than $1/day. You can cancel your subscription at any point without all your work getting erased. When you are ready to play again, it’s easy to start your account back up.
You can be a casual player like myself and enjoy it or be a more intense gamer and enjoy it.
So the biggest appeal to you isn’t that you get to be somebody else?
It might be for some people but not for me.My character is different than me, I mean, I don’t go around killing monsters.
But it’s a way of networking too. You make friends. Sometimes I’ve gone on and don’t do much with my character but just chat.
It sounds like there is a lot of interaction. Does this entirely exist online? How do people stay nice to each other?
Real life conferences happen around the game so people will get together, in person, to play and talk about it.
As far asaccess, the game has players of all ages and it’s monitored. There are admins, people on the site for quality control. If you have someone harassing you, you can report them to an admin. You can block individual people like in Facebook, and, like other social networking sites, if you violate the terms, you get kicked off.
Does WoW have a lot of competition? If you were to make improvements, what would they be?
There are several MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing game) but WoW is by far the largest.
I think what makes WoW really successful is, in addition to making big upgrades every couple years, they make weekly updates to the game based on players’ feedback and fix glitches.
That attentiveness extends to their tech support. Someone hacked into my account earlier this year and they were really helpful with that.
It would take a lot for an online gaming system to compete with WoW. Its influence has extended offline as I think it’s inspired a lot of the traditional gaming systems to integrate their games for online play. Being able to play my favorite game with someone from across the world is something I think has happened as a result of WoW technology.
Note from Nicole: I’m not sure if I’ll ever get into gaming but I have now better understanding why people play these online games and how they are influencing peoples’ interactions online and off. And with 11.5 million players on WoW alone, online gamers are a market some companies might want to pay more attention to.