1. The expanded game experience By Gustaf Ericson

2. Introduction Why are people becoming addicted to World of Warcraft? I’ve been asking myself that question since I started playing a bit over two years ago. When we got this assignment I thought I’d take a closer look at what might be causing this, but a game is so much more than just a game. I needed to see the whole picture and therefore I’ve taken a look into the expanded game experience of World of Warcraft.

4. The game You are a character designed by yourself, picked out of ten different races, and trained as one of ten different classes. Your allegiance is with either the Alliance or the Horde, each home to five of the races. You start off as a simple warrior trying to prove his worth and defend what’s important to him. As you move on by performing quests and defeating monsters you become stronger and learn more and better abilities. From a lady having lost her bag to a world-threatening demon, there’s no limit on what you may set off to do.

5. The core World of Warcraft uses a simple click-to-target kind of play, where you highlight what you want to target and then have a key assigned to execute the action. You observe from a third person perspective, but can zoom in to a first person as well. The controls are very similar to FPS-games, using a combination of the keyboard and the mouse to play. You use the regular WASD keys to walk, the numbers to use different abilities and the mouse to steer and target. Although, this is just the normal way of doing it. There are endless ways to configure almost every action you can make.

6. The shell World of Warcraft is set in a whole world which actually exists there the whole time, it’s not instanced (loaded on demand). The world itself includes every possible kind of climate and environment; from snowy mountain peaks to moldy moist dungeons and green jungles. It is indeed a spectacular view when you fly over the landscapes going towards new adventures. For a game that is this big the graphical effects are stunning, and made in a very distinct cartoonish way that has become the signum of Blizzards games. As it is a role-playing game, most of the non-player characters can be interacted with in one way or another, even if it’s limited to a programmed respons.

7. Here’s a picture of some of the quite impressice effects in-game

8. Expanded game experience When you’re talking about the expanded game experience, or EGE, there are six points of interest in particular that one should look closer at, as explained by Annakaisa Kultima in one of the podcasts. These are information retrieval, enabling, preparations, gameplay, afterplay and disposal. I will now look into each one of these points to try and gain further understanding of the game I’m playing. (For the gameplay, see previous slides)

14. Conclusions With all these things going on around the game itself, it’s easy to understand why some people can spend so much time on it. It’s quite easy to get started, but I think that for a person to get through that first step of upgrading from trial to full account he needs to be a curious one. And when there’s this much to do and explore, and curious person is caught. I don’t know if I have understood why people are getting addicted (as opposed to playing a lot) yet, but I am at least a step closer. Perhaps I need to take a closer look at myself next!