About activity theory and WoW

During this week I've been thinking about the activity theory introduced in the slides [1.] and also about computer games in which there's a strong social aspect present. Gaming has been discussed on other posts on this week as well. [2],[3]

As most of us probably know, today's most popular MMOPRG is World of Warcraft. WoW has 12 million subscribers [4]. The social aspects of the game play in mind, I've been wondering especially why Wow is so popular...

Maybe the most interesting thing is that it is the community of players themselves who create most of the content of the game. The story, the characters, the adventures, the fights. So it seems quite obvious that the key issue (at least one of them) in the gaming is it's social nature.

Citing what's been said about the activity theory on the slides: “Using activity theory as a framework suggests that program development must attend not only space, the external physical context, but also to the context the individual brings to the situation, the context of the tool/device, the information context, and finally the context created by the activity itself” [5]. It seems that the theory goes very well with WoW. Players are the contributors, the game is the tool, there are common rules, and so on. Finally the outcome of the process is the whole, social gaming experience.

[1] https://learning.uta.fi/mod/resource/view.php?id=203938
[2] http://mission-groupware.blogspot.com/2011/02/gratification-of-online-games.html
[3] http://awarecrew.blogspot.com/2011/02/addiction-to-unreal-world-online.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft
[5] https://learning.uta.fi/mod/resource/view.php?id=203938, slide 47.