An exploration of world of Warcraft for the gamification of virtual organizations

What can we learn from World of Warcraft for gamifying (virtual) organizations? The use of information technology for executing a wide array of alliances in order to seize specific market opportunities is making emerge new forms of “virtual organizations.” Virtual organizations rely on teams that are temporary or geographically dispersed and may even include forms of crowd working and crowdsourcing. The opportunities and issues introduced by this novel scenario, due to, for instance, the difficulty of motivating members to work together from a distance, necessarily lead to new “design challenges.” To this aim, gamification has been proposed to support virtual organizational activities. Nonetheless, gamification designers still appear not to fully exploit the insights that games may provide, overlooking opportunities for eliciting experiences of gamefulness, a unique experiential condition lived while playing games. In this article, I suggest that we look at a game like World of Warcraft (WoW) to draw inspiration for designing “gameful organizations,” namely virtual organizations that enjoy, engage, and empower their members affording gameful experiences. Through a reflexive ethnographic approach that values the subjective experience of playing games, I investigate how WoW supports organizational strategies that afford the experience of gamefulness. Then, I propose some design considerations aimed at creating virtual organizations that rely on the insights offered by video games. In so doing, I go back to the source of gamification to rehash and redefine what gamification should be about.