Eesti online mängijad World of Warcrafti näitel
Date
2007
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
The purpose of this study is to examine online gamers on the example of Estonian World
of Warcraft (WoW) players. The objective is to study their preferences in the game
according to the online gamer typology created by Alix (2005) and to look more
thoroughly at their offline and online social motives for gaming. For this study 12 WoW
gamers were interviewed via the Internet.
WoW is a popular online computer game that has more then 9 million subscribers all
over the world and around 1000 active players in Estonia. The classification of the game
is MMORPG which means Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. It is a type
of game where the player can connect to a server over the Internet to play with other
people in a world defined by a game’s producer.
After bringing out the results it appears that all the gamers interviewed had played at least
one other type of game earlier, which they had stopped playing after discovering World
of Warcraft. This means that WoW took over players from other game genres and thus
has formed itself a great dedicated community.
In regard to Alix’s (2005) typology, it was concluded, that with some exceptions it was
possible to use those archetypes on Estonian WoW players who were interviewed,
although most of them were mixed types.
Most of the interviewed played their first computer game when they were about 6 to 10
years old. Offline social motives were mostly important for the people to get in contact
with computers in the first place and after that started playing games on them. After the
initial contact the offline non-playing communities (family and friends) rather discourage
gaming activities.
Overall, for Estonian World of Warcraft players, there were two types of social online
motives for playing – character-based and reasons based on interaction and competition.
Both of the reasons were equally as popular.
Keywords
H Social Sciences (General)