Why is World of Warcraft so Compelling?

As a former World of Warcraft gamer for nearly 4 consecutive years, with fluctuating levels of commitment between casual and hardcore, I feel I have a good amount of experience which allows me to give some insights as to what is so compelling/addicting about World of Warcraft.

Why is World of Warcraft so compelling? Because MMORPGs provide an alternate reality where a player can log on any time and achieve something, gain progress in some meaningful (in game) way, and everyone loves feeling accomplished.

Let me give an example, what if anytime you had a few hours free, you knew you could go to the mall and there would be any number of stores there willing to pay you $10 an hour to do some sort of simple task like folding clothes or juicing lemons or shelving merchandise? You wouldn’t have to pre-arrange when you’d show up, or how long you’d stay, or have any previous experience. There was simply an endless supply of $10 an hour tasks that anyone can do any time.

Better than that though, what if these $10 an hour tasks weren’t tedious boring tasks like the examples above, but things you might have fun doing, like playing ping-pong, or trying on new clothes, or climbing a rock wall. There are hundreds of different tasks you could do to earn your $10 an hour. Maybe you don’t like trying on new clothes, but you love ping-pong, and you can be rewarded any time to go play! Each of these tasks are designed specifically to be challenging enough to be engaging, but easy enough that you can generally succeed. And even if you don’t succeed, you still get $5 an hour for trying.

In addition to these great solo $10 tasks, there are various people from around the world that you can interact with if you want. You can even gather 4 random friends (or bring up to 4 of your own friends) and participate in an hour long task that you participate in as a team and get paid $15 an hour plus the chance to receive bonus cash. For example, you sign up with 4 other people to play three 5v5 basketball games against some robot opponents. After winning each game, one of the 5 of you gets a bonus $50 in addition to the 25$ hourly wage. Once again the robot teams are designed to be challenging and require that you work as a team, but they are still easy enough that you’re likely succeed. Even if you fail you can try as many times as you’d like and still get the $50 bonus once you win.

In addition to these $10 solo tasks and $25 five person instance tasks, you can organize or join with 24 other people to have a 25 man paintball battle against very challenging robot opponents. These paintball battles need all 25 people to work together to be successful, and take a time commitment of 3 or more hours, but for every team your team beats, 3 or 4 people receive $200. If your team is good, you can beat as many as 10 opposing teams which results in 30-40 $200 bonuses. As with all the other options so far, these once again are designed to be very challenging, and require all 25 people to work together to succeed. But the teamwork combined with the $200 bonuses make the experience very rewarding. And if you form a guild of mall friends, you can have regularly scheduled paintball battles where friends you know you can count on show up to team up with you, and you have a system set up to make sure everyone is rewarded fairly with their share of $200 bonuses based on how often they show up.

It doesn’t end here, if the idea of taking on challenges against robots doesn’t appeal to you, there’s places where you alone, or you as part of a group of 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, or 40 can compete against other groups of the same size at various different tasks of your choice, and you’ll get paid $25 an hour for losing or $50 an hour for winning. You’re paired up against opponents of a similar skill level so there’s always a good chance of winning or losing.

Basically, these in game worlds provide a massive number of in game options which all reward you with in game accomplishment. When someone plays a game like World of Warcraft, they can see the progress they’re making through getting money, or leveling up, or improving their gear, or earning achievement points, and so on. In real life, even when going to work and knowing you’re earning money, the fruits of your labors are not immediately apparent. More likely they come in a bi-weekly lump that never feels like enough, and you’re painfully aware some entity decided to take a cut of your earnings. In a game, the rewards of your effort appear immediately, and you get to keep all of it yourself. In contrast, it almost makes a real job feel like imaginary achievement while video games are the real tangible achievement.

So why is World of Warcraft so compelling? I believe it’s the sense of accomplishment. I assert that people who struggle with video game addiction have a very weak differentiation between accomplishment in real life and accomplishment in games. Since everyone likes to feel accomplished, and video games are much easier to succeed at than real life, they prioritize video games over real life.