Social interaction in WoW particularly comes from the NEED to have someone else help you. In the chat channels you will usually find people advertising for help with a quest, help to have something made etc. It would not be the same game it is today if it weren’t for the necessity of other players to attain certain goals.

You state that

“They simply represent two very different types of play on the web, one ideal for maintaining relationships and the other for creating new ones”

I’ve been doing a lot of research recently in the UK, talking to teenagers about social gaming. We’ve spoken to over 30 teenagers and only 1 of them claims to have created a new relationship through gaming. He got to know a guy through XBOX live and met up with him IRL when he came over to England from the states. However, this relationship died down when he went back to America.

What we’ve found is that social gaming is good at reinforcing existing offline friendships: giving teens the chance to share experiences, talk about games, compete, and show off their records. Games can form the backdrop to important friend bonding times, but many ’social’ games are bad at bringing whole friendship groups together and games that do [such as WoW] are quite exclusive in their nature [many teens perceive MMORPGS to be sad and geeky].

I was wondering what your views were on this, as i’d be really interested to talk more about it and discuss my findings in more depth.

Thanks, Tom

(link)

With Qajack, we’re endeavouring to create the next web addiction that will seek to define everything in sight within the framework of a wholly engaging social game.

It’s predicated on gambling with what you know. Knowledge is an asset.