"It Was More than Just the Game, It Was the Community": Social Affordances in Online Games

We analyze social affordances from World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO). These affordances contributed to community development and social experiences. To reduce the time needed to play and make gameplay easier, expansions to the game removed or altered many affordances. The changes were appealing to some, but diminished social experience, to the dismay of other players. As social life continues to move into virtual worlds of all kinds, we argue that developers should provide different versions of virtual worlds to broaden the kinds of social experiences possible. We examine "private servers" as a form of resistance, where players create their own versions of the game to accommodate their play preferences.