WoW players as lab rats

I often quote the Playon blog at the Palo Alto Research Center for World of Warcraft related data, for the simple reason that there aren't many other sites giving data at all. But of course if you have people from a research center and Nick Yee from the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab observing WoW together, the result is a scientific paper titled "Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games".

The conclusion of this scientific paper is that "joint activities are not very prevalent, especially in the early stages of the game", or in other words, people spend most of their leveling time solo. Doh! I think every WoW player already knew that. Okay, it is nice to have that fact established with data. But even the data tell you nothing about whether people solo out of personal preference, or whether soloing is simply the pathway of least resistance in this particular game, and people just do whatever it takes to level fastest.

For example in figure 4 it is shown that Warlocks and Hunters spent the least amount of time in a group, and priests the most amount of time. That is interpreted as Warlocks and Hunters being good at soloing, Priests being less good. But that is a commonly held misconception, Priests are actually very good at soloing to 60, as long as they spec in shadow and arm themselves with a good wand. And the third least grouping class is the Warrior, which I would classify rather as a group specialized class than as a solo class. The reason why priests group so much more than other classes is simply that there aren't enough of them. The moment you log on a priest, you get bombarded with tells inviting you to groups. Warriors are much more frequent, and thus have a harder time finding a group.

I tried to find a group to go to BRD this weekend with my warrior, and failed. No healer to be found, as usual. So the guys from PARC, if they were observing me at that moment, would have listed me as "warrior, not grouped" in their statistics. Which tells them nothing about what I wanted to do, but more about the inability to run a high-level group without priests, and the relative lack of priests (especially of priests not being snatched up by a guild and being busy raiding). Even the shortcomings of the WoW looking for group user interface had a bigger effect on my behavior than any "social dynamics" as claimed in the paper.

Still the paper is an interesting read. I especially liked the comparison of WoW with a Skinner box, a device used in a lab where you train a rat to push a lever and get a piece of cheese as reward. The authors compare the smooth WoW leveling curve with such a Skinner box, with the player being "trained" to do quests for rewards, with the challenges continually getting slightly more difficult for slightly better rewards, until the player is thoroughly addicted. Makes you feel like a lab rat when playing WoW. :)