Got Change? World of Warcraft and City of Heroes Players’ Views on Customization

Sonam Adinolf · Selen Turkay

Thu., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Class of ’24 (4th floor, East Central)

The purpose of this study is to extend our previous study with World of Warcraft (WoW) players on customization, which we presented at GLS 2008. Finding a strong relationship between customization and player engagement prompted us to investigate further. In this study, our goals were threefold: To broaden our sample size for more reliable results, to extend our research to include another MMO from a different genre (in this case, superhero), and to ask more in–depth questions to investigate players’ specific desires for customization, and the underlying reasons for those choices.

As we noted at last year’s GLS, there is a particular lack of published research examining specific uses and effects of customization in games. The results of several studies on learner control in computer–based instruction (CBI) indicate the positive effects of learner control over elements of instruction (Corbalan, Kester, & van Merriënboer, 2006; Kinzie, Sullivan, & Berdel, 1988; Shyu & Brown, 1992). Sweetser and Wyeth (2005) mapped the seven required elements of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) onto gaming, and concluded that players’ control over their game play is one of the requirements.

Research on customization has generally focused on user interfaces, but not on features such as customizing game characters, audio, terrain, etc. (Dyck, et al., 2003). Developers need to understand which types of customization are important, related to users, and the software/game being developed. Several experiments have shown that individuals prefer objects or experiences that are closely tied to their self (Petty et al., 2002). In the last year, Ducheneaut et al. (2008), at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) have examined the most important avatar customization features, and found that the hair was the most important feature across three virtual worlds, possibly because users help define their personality through changing their avatar’s hair.

In last year’s study, we concluded that the ability to customize was more important to players than many other major game traits, including graphics. We also discovered that people’s preferences for types of customization were strong enough to show statistically significant results even in very small subsets of the population. The current study surveyed 222 WoW players, and 102 CoX (City of Heroes/Villains) players. We asked questions about customization, its use, and its effects on enjoyment and engagement. Our results showed trends in customization among these two different MMO player pools. Out of the total population, 65.94% +/- 6.14(p<0.05) said that the ability to customize affected their enjoyment to a moderate or large degree. More specifically, 65.25% +/-6.08(p<0.05) said that customizing their character’s appearance was either somewhat or very important for their enjoyment. When asked about Talents or Power Sets, 68.64% +/- 5.92(p<0.05), said the same. Ninety–five percent of the participants who answered the related open ended question (n=103) wanted to customize their appearance to be unique in the gaming world.

This presentation will provide statistical analysis of scalar questions spanning customization, enjoyment, engagement, and motivations. We will also provide qualitative analysis of open–ended responses to provide better understanding of players’ reasons to customize.

References

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Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Wen, M., Wadley, G. (2008). Why hair matters? Retrieved from http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2008/09/why_hair_matter.html#more

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