These guys are good. Very good. I hope the formula for World Of Warcraft’s addictiveness was discovered accidentally. If it was actually designed this way, there are some extremely dark and sinister agents abroad in the world of computer gaming.

After downloading the game for about 10billion years, I logged in and was asked to join a realm. Realms exist for different languages, geographical locations, and preferred gaming style. They also prevent the server getting overloaded and gameplay suffering when too many people are online. The game just asked me what my language and gaming style were and recommended a server. I clicked OK.

Next up was to create a character, my playing piece in the game. This is point number 1 they got right. When you create a character, you invest a part of yourself in the game. I thought about how I play Unreal Tournament and decided to be a Rogue. The little write-up got me all excited about striking from the shadows and being suitable for training as an assassin or spy.

For many people, this would be the first stumbling block to playing the game. Traditionally, creating a character involves balancing lots of factors like the character’s strength, agility, stamina, intelligence, charm etc. Not so here. If you are not fussy you can immediately click OK and start playing. The casual user who doesn’t want to know or care about the details can go straight in the game and start killing wolves. I got to choose my Race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome), Class (Warrior, Rogue, etc), and select my gender, face, hair and beard. One more click and I was in the game.

Once in the game, I wandered around a bit, helped by little info boxes popping up telling me what I could do and how to work the interface. Once I got the hang of the slightly wacky mouse buttons I was away, running around Northshire Abbey, attacking wolves, finding pickups, and talking to the locals, both players and non-players. Really very easy, and this is point 2 they got right. You can take the game at your own pace. If you decide to ignore the help boxes you can still wander around talking to people, getting invited to duel others, killing wolves for experience points (XP, which give you power-ups and open up new game features as you play), selling scraps of wolf meat for copper coins, and so on. If you want to take on a quest, you wander up to someone with an exclamation point above their head, do a bit of reading, and there’s your quest.

A word about Player vs Player. This at first was a disappointment to me because you can’t gain experience points by fighting another player, nor can you normally kill the other player or take his or her items. PvP is just for “finding out who the better warrior is”. Seemed pretty rubbish at first. But on the bright side, this avoids two importantly crappy outcomes:

1) Players just standing around at the point where new players arrive, killing them, and building up their XP (”spawn camping”) and

2) “Ganking” - which is where a player persistently hampers another player’s progress - would be a lot worse if the gankee lost more than pride.

So I have to concede that they probably got this right too. Point 3: it doesn’t put off brand new players. People get used to the crapness of PvP quickly, whereas new players would almost certainly be put off if they got a good shoeing every time they entered the game.

So far the game seems pretty harmless, and true, if you have the right personality for it, you could log in for an hour, wander about a bit, have some fun, and log out and get on with your life. However, it also starts to play on the social angle and peer pressure comes to bear.

If you start on a quest (e.g. kill 8 wolves and 4 bears), you might arrive at a location and others are also there, trying to complete the same quest. You team up, being able to watch one another’s backs. You end up with a real sense of having bonded with these people in the virtual world as you wipe out groups of monsters that you could never tackle alone, and as you observe your team-mates’ styles of combat and try to adjust accordingly. Point 4: virtual camaraderie.

If you die, the penalty is only that you have to walk back to your corpse or get resurrected with your items weakened. In other words, it’s nearly impossible to actually fail at this game. However, if you’re in a party then you feel like you should get back and help your comrades out, so point 5: even death does not encourage you to disconnect.

The game sticks a big crowbar in your “keeping up with the Joneses” instinct. You are created in some basic clothes with a simple weapon, and as you wander around you encounter people with bright cloaks, glowing swords, riding broomsticks, horses and big cats, and generally being very clearly better than you. I thought my rogue would look good on a bay mare and with a long grey cloak. Point 6: It seems worth getting the next level up and earning a bit more gold just to try some of those cool things. As you progress, however, you start to see that others have even cooler things…

There is also a wide variety of activities available - you can trade directly with players, go to auction houses, train up in skills like cooking, fishing or tailoring… so whenever the quests are looking like they’re going nowhere, Point 7: there are always plenty of things to do without disconnecting.

In conclusion, WOW has a number of features that press the right buttons to keep you connected and keep you paying the subscription.  If you’re the obsessive type of person (I am) then I think this is definitely one to avoid.

1. Player can strongly identify with the character in the game,
2. Quick to get in as a new player,
3. New players can’t easily be put off by malicious experienced players,
4. You bond with other characters in the game through shared goals and experiences,
5. Dying is not the end, not even of the current quest,
6. Cool toys dangled just out of reach, unwittingly by other players,
7. Lots of variety of things to do.