Design by crowdsourcing. Perhaps the problem with World of Warcraft is the manner in which it is caught up in the capitalist mode of thinking. Never has a game been more inclined to get the individual to spend money, nor waste time, on the superfluous. The game is a social game and like all social games, monetizing has become the answer to many of the game’s flawed designs. The problematic use of the incentive of virtual property, the originator of popular downloadable content, is still itself a bad game, effectively a user-interface that also happens to contain a game within.

In some sense, even calling it a game is problematic, because a game likely implies progress that is not infinitely rearranged by the creators. Every other year the wheel is reset, and running in it again, while likely having some kind of interesting ritualistic effect, is unlikely to be enjoyable in itself. More to the point, playing this game in a vacuum, it is very much not a game at all, but rather a vast, empty wasteland upon which programmers have created constructs to waste time. Inside the system, there are clearly game-like elements, but each of them is only partially enjoyable and the purpose becomes collectively making the game less terrible.

The problem of World of Warcraft is that alone the system is clearly not satisfying. If the system is not terribly satisfying alone, as a game which does not encourage exploration of space even in the singular, the throngs of the many are likely to confine the space further by shrinking the sense of the individual’s unique presence within the game. Though the many would shout that it is a game of the collective and thus owned in part by everyone, the game’s flaws rest entirely upon the impinging status of the end-user onto the other end-user, where the designer has no ability to control the influences of the individual on other individuals. This leads also to the problematic realities of virtual currencies, but such arguments have been stated elsewhere and with more research than is available in a short review.

World of Warcraft’s system is fundamentally flawed, where problems with development practices are being overlooked in favor of attempting to satisfy an audience too large to actually please. As a result, the game often seems to be attempting to go in all directions at once. As a result of this, World of Warcraft is now a lumbering hulk with chains pulling in all directions from years of entire system revisions to the game and, at times, the game engine itself. None of these fixes have ultimately led to the game being much more than it originally set out to be, and sadly it remains a system half-realized in an expansive, time-wasting vortex.

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