Social Game Elements in World of Warcraft: Interpersonal Relations, Groups, and Organizations for Gamification Design

Despite the growing interest for gamification research within the Human–Computer interaction community, gamification techniques still suffer from a limited availability of game elements to be employed in design practices. Researchers and practitioners are anchored to the use of points, badges, and leaderboards, rarely introducing novel design solutions coming from games. In this article, I propose to look at World of Warcraft (WoW) to find insights for designing novel online communities based on gamified features. By exploring through an ethnographic work how WoW “shapes” its players’ social relations and how specific “social game elements” impact on their subjective experiences, I will propose a series of design suggestions that could be employed to “enhance” the user experience within online communities in domain as diverse as learning, fitness, and crowdsourcing.