This chapter looks at the World of Warcraft through the lens of the theories introduced earlier in the thesis. Using this framework, I show how extending WoW to mobile can enhance the player's experience. I will suggest a small subset of potential changes that best support a mobile extension. I'm using WoW as a starting point because it is currently the best-known game of its kind and therefore best suited to help illustrate and communicate changes to an existing design. I'll discuss topics such as player versus player combat, the auction house, and communication.
Communication
Communicating with other players is an important component of any MMO. Communication allows players to socialize and feel together in a virtual world. Players can communicate in several ways in MMOs. They can text chat with each other in real time. They can post on the games forum's asynchronously. They can send each other mail asynchronously. They can use emotes that make their avatars clap, dance, bow, etc. they can engage in an activity that's visible to others, like travel, combat, and fishing. In short, players have many ways with which to facilitate communication.
Voice Chat
Mobile can extend that communication, allowing players to feel present more frequently or continuously. We can extend certain modes of communication to mobile more easily than others. With the limited textual input bandwidth mobile provides players, voice chat may connect players best. Some games, like Eve Online, support VOIP chat (Internet telephony) within the game. In games that don't support VOIP, dedicated guilds have long used separate software (Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype) to achieve the same purpose. In an MMO, voice, more than text, helps people
• share information quickly
• feel closer by hearing tones of voice and laughter
• feel present
Not coincidentally, voice communication is also a major feature provided by cell phones. To pull mobile players into the game, let them stay in voice contact with their group or guild while away from the PC. They will feel on equal footing with their teammates on PCs, since both platforms provide robust support for voice. Voice chat, more than anything else, enhances copresence. Support for voice mail could enhance asynchronous social presence.
Unfortunately, voice chat can decrease presence and ability to self construct. Physical presence, dependent upon maintaining the validity of the virtual world, can quickly dissolve when players' voices undermine role-playing and the world's fiction. An accent or vocabulary not evident in text chat can come out through voice. Hearing other players voices decreases primarily physical presence, but using one's own voice can decrease self presence. MMOs provide flexibility in experimenting with different constructions of self, but that flexibility depends upon leaving other selves behind. Bringing one's voice to a new self may bring other elements of the real self along, too, constraining the range of experimentation available.
We can keep voice from constraining self-construction by masking players voices with audio filters. These filters can make players sound like the opposite gender, like a robot, or like a monster. Orcs could have guttural voices. Undead could have wispy voices. Night elves could have rich, smooth voices. These audio filters would do nothing to reduce incongruence between vocabulary and fiction, but changing the sound of the voice would help significantly.
Some people will prefer playing games with voice chat and others will prefer games without. The market can support both kinds of games. Individual games can attempt to cater to both audiences by providing robust controls over voice chat. Players must be able to easily mute other players temporarily or permanently, individually or as a group. Some environments, like taverns, could always involve voice chat, while others, like libraries, might never allow it. This transition could actually enhance physical presence, as players feel the impact of moving through space on the types of interactions allowed.
Text Chat
Text chat constitutes most communication in WoW. Players type questions and comments to each other almost continuously. Players also automatically join chat channels as they enter new spaces -- channels for commerce, defense, and group organization. If they belong to a guild, players see that chat as well. In order to feel copresent, players logging in from mobile devices would need access to all of these chat channels.
Mobile allows players to read text fairly easily, but it hinders text input. Most cell phones simply have a number pad, which can be used to enter text by “triple tapping” keys -- repeatedly pushing the same button until the proper character appears on the screen. While many mobile users are already adept at triple tapping for texting, the 
process still wastes time, precludes longer form conversation, and can cause repetitive strain injuries. If triple tapping is a player's only form of inputting text, he will feel frustrated and cut off from socializing in the game.
Some mobile devices have full QWERTY keyboard. The keys on those keyboards are small and close together, as some people have trouble hitting only one key at a time. Still, players can much more quickly select a key on a QWERTY keyboard than they can produce the same character using triple tap. This input mechanism could allow full text chat participation from mobile players. Most mobile devices don't have QWERTY keyboards. More and more devices have them all the time, but there may always be some segmentation. When gaming becomes an important selling feature for a more players, though, people who want to access MMOs from their cell phones will probably opt for devices with keyboards.
Voice recognition could also allow players to input text quickly without relying on keypresses. Cell phones already use voice-recognition for hands-free dialing and menu navigation. Their voice recognition capabilities can't handle free text input at this point. Cell phones don't have the processing power or memory required to do full voice-recognition. However, they may have this power in the near future. I have written this whole thesis with voice recognition software, so clearly free text input is possible. Unfortunately, voice recognition requires space where players can make noise. This severely limits the situations in which players can log into the game and expect social 
interaction. It also confuses players already in the game who won't know whether the person who just logged in can chat or not. Voice recognition, at best, would supplement another technique for entering text silently.
Mobile users can also employ small, detachable keyboards or even projected keyboard where a camera detects finger position on an ordinary surface. Both of these solutions unfortunately require users to be seated and stationery, probably with a fixed surface in front of them. Again, this requirement makes use impractical for many situations in which mobile users may want to play WoW.
Some multiplayer games targeted at children disallow free text input for privacy and safety. These games sometimes allow players to chat with each other by selecting preconstructed sentences. WoW could take the same approach for mobile users, letting them quickly enter text by choosing from a set list of sentences. This would cut off most opportunities for self construction by severely limiting creative possibility, but it would enable copresence by letting players interact in real time.
Sacrificing copresence, the best solution for the near future may be to emphasize mobile players as consumers of information rather than producers, at least for text chat. After all, players can easily read silently, quickly, and without the need for a stationary, flat surface.
Status Updates
Given that mobile can deliver information quickly and efficiently to players, what kind of information do players want to access through mobile? Players want access to all of the chat going on in around them in their zone, guild, and party. They should be able to see all chat, even if they can't easily participate. Also, provide an automatically generated text channel specifically for mobile players that summarizes group members' activities at a high-level. For example:
JoeBigSword creates an auction (Boots of Prettiness)
MagicUser learns a new skill (Fireball of Hotness)
[ALL] party enters instance (Molten Core)
[ALL] party enters combat
JoeBigSword dies
MagicUser resurrects JoeBigSword
MagicUser levels up to 58!
…
Players could set this activity summary text channel to only show messages of a specific level of significance or higher. A player who is devoting all of his attention to the game may set the channel threshold to its lowest setting, showing every combat move and every tradeskill item creation. A player who wants less frequent updates could set the channel threshold to its highest setting, showing only player deaths, guild member connects/disconnects, and level ups. I can read only the highest rated comments or half of the comments or all of them. The web community Slashdot gives its users a similar feature, allowing them to filter comments based on ratings. This simple customization does take some effort on the part of the player to understand and customize. About half of Slashdot readers don't take the time to customize the ratings fell through. The average preference for users who do customize channel filtering could be applied back to players who don't customize, according to their reading or play patterns (Lampe, Johnston, and Resnick 2007).
In addition to all of this real-time information, players also want access to other kinds of information that get updated frequently. Players want to browse profiles of each other's avatars and see what's changed recently, just as they do with MySpace and Facebook now. Profiles increase asynchronous social presence by letting players consume and interact with interesting social information on their own time. They also increase self presence by adding weight and permanence to players' alter egos. Players can engage in this kind of interaction briefly or continuously, and repeatedly, and they can start and stop at any time. Profiles should include screenshots players consider relevant or interesting, a log of activities that advance them through the game, like leveling up, a list of events they plan to engage in soon, like doing raids and instances, who has joined and left guilds and other interest groups, and most other information found in cutting-edge social networks. All of this information should be aggregated through some RSS-like news feed, as Facebook does. As social networks become increasingly relevant for our real-life personae, virtual personae without social networks at worst seem invalid and at best seem obsolete.
MMOs should support one master profile for each player which links to or contains separate profiles for each of the player's avatars. Players don't want to feel that they are abandoning a cherished avatar when they start a new one, so each avatar should have its place in a social network. Players may want to abandon a previous self and start fresh, so all avatar profiles should have an option to be made invisible.
As fun and useful as players would find browsing profiles from mobile, these profiles would serve an important function for PC players as well. They could help support community. As Wellman writes and Rheingold summarizes, community comes from networks. MMOs traditionally support groups, not networks, limiting community. Rheingold writes:
One of Wellman's claims is that "we find community in networks, not groups." He explained that "a group is a special type of network: densely-knit (most people are directly connected), tightly-bounded (most ties stay within the densely-knit cluster), and multi-stranded (most ties contain many role relationships).” (56-7)
WoW, and most MMOs, do very little to enable networks, focusing instead on groups. For instance, players should be able to market their unique skills to all other players. If a guild needs to fill a slot for a raid -- maybe they need a healer who can ward against Fear -- they should be able to go to a classifieds listing or social network of the freelance services of highly-rated players. They should be able to browse and search profiles, evaluating potential hires based on experience (dungeons completed), gear, success/failure ratios, ratings from past teammates, current online/off-line status, and asking price. The fact that there is no easy way for guilds to fill these holes means there is no viable role for freelancers. Thus, members of groups remain connected with each other and more disconnected than necessary from relevant strangers.
Players want to access status updates on changes that affect gameplay. They want to list, bid, and check on auctions. Some players will want SMS messages sent to them when auctions succeed or fail, or when a tracked resource gets newly listed. For many players, the auction house represents the perfect mobile interaction. Checking the status of auctions brings interesting, actionable information quickly but with little time pressure. 
Players can complete the interaction of checking their auctions using only part of their attention, allowing them to do so frequently and in many situations. In making WoW mobile, we should discover and invent several similar activities with different time frames. Players may not want to check on the status of 10 activities all the time, but they may enjoy checking on the status of one activity every few hours, another activity every day, a third activity every week, and a fourth activity every month. Some activities should probably not be on regular timetables, like receiving mail (probably an SMS alert), so that every time the activity occurs the player is pleasantly surprised. All of these kinds of interactions drive player interest back to the game world continually, increasing personal relevancy, self presence, and both kinds of social presence.
Some designers have created MMOs around the principles of driving players back to the game repeatedly to check for status updates. The textbased, mobile and web cross-platform MMO The Violet Sector does just that. Teams of 50 or so players compete with other teams for control of a space sector. Teams win or lose based on their strategies, which all players can help negotiate, and based on attendance. Players get five action points that they can spend every three hours, and they lose unspent points. The more players on the team log in to spend their points in accordance with the team strategy, the better the team can compete. Everyone feels useful at predictable intervals that drive play patterns. Players log into the game to check for updated orders from their team leader (who they've elected), and then log back in later to execute those orders. This checking and executing can happen from a PC web browser or from a mobile phone. That players can stay linked in while away from the computer allows them to commit to checking in frequently. If they knew they had to stay tethered to the PC, they likely wouldn't invest in such an activity. Much tension comes from orders that require players to log in at a particular time. For instance, an order may direct players to attack the enemy in a particular zone at a particular time. The players online at that time take shots at the enemy. Frequently, the attacking team may find itself unable to completely destroy an enemy ship, but if only a couple more players would log in they could finish the job. Sometimes, another player or two does log in and saves the day. Those kinds of moments reinforce for all players the importance of attendance, and each player feels crucial to the team's operations.
The Violet Sector had limited appeal due to its low production values and frequent required check-ins. Only some segment of players willingly checks the game status for updates multiple times every three-hour window. However, most players would probably willingly check game status updates less frequently. MMOs should provide a range of activities with different required time frames to appeal to different players. If designers make these activities mutually exclusive, players will have to choose which they engage in. Players who willingly invest more time more frequently will probably choose the activity that requires the most time and frequency if the game sufficiently rewards them for that activity. Players who only want to check in every so often can choose the activity with less time requirements (but also less reward). All such activities can complement each other, such that players to invest more time still depend upon the players to engage in the activity that requires less time. This sets up a dynamic where everyone feels useful but can still engage with the game on her own terms. This increases personal and social relevancy, and asynchronous social presence. Synchronized check-ins like order execution in The Violet Sector increased copresence as well. And, all of it increases non-transporting physical presence by making the world feel more alive and valid.
Another game, Travian, allows players to build up resources slowly over time. They may only build up enough resources during one day to take one action within the game world, resulting in 10 or so minutes of play. does not require appointment gaming, so players can check in with the game world whenever they choose. However, it does build up increasing enticements for players over time that encourage them to check in. Resource accumulation alone brings players back, as they want to spend those resources to maximize growth within their cities. They also want to spend those resources because they can only store so many at one time, and excess resources will get wasted. Anxiety builds up over time as well. At any point, one player can attack another players cities. It takes time for troops to move from the attacking city to the defending city, and during that time the defending city receives warning that an onslaught is on the move. If players check in frequently, they can observe incoming attacks and prepare. The longer a player goes without checking in, the higher the likelihood that he will miss opportunities to defend against attacks. This dynamic increases personal relevancy, too. It reduces copresence, but increases asynchronous social presence as players must prepare to respond to the actions of opponents.
Both of these dynamics that drive player desire to check game status, from The Violet Sector and from Travian, could help WoW integrate compelling mobile play as well as increasing relevancy and presence for all players. Like WoW's existing resting bonus, they drive players back to the game after a certain amount of time because the passage of time alone has increased to the interestingness of the virtual world and the reward for play in it.
Sorting and Rating
People love viewing, rating, tagging, and sorting player-generated content. They love doing it with videos on YouTube, with photos on Flickr, with portraits on HOT or NOT, and with 3D models in The Sims 2 Exchange. All of these activities translate perfectly to mobile, since they
- can take as little or as much time as the user desires,
- can be started and stopped at any time with no penalty for interruption, and
- constantly promise a fresh experience.
In addition, these activities provide significant benefits regardless of the platform, including
- letting the user exert influence upon the media he's consuming, and
- informing the system about each user's tastes.
Finally, player-created content reduces costs for the developer, especially over time, and helps to sustain the kind of long-term community MMOs depend upon.
What opportunities for a rating and player-created content exist in WoW? Avatar appearance varies significantly from player to player and can be a source of pride. Some players go out of their way to obtain clothing and equipment that looks interesting or attractive, and most players enjoy observing a range of avatar appearances. A simple HOT or NOT interface applied to WoW avatars could maintain player attention for a long time. However, players may not care as much about the perceived hotness of their avatars as they do about their uniqueness or creativity. Additional controls for customizing avatar appearance, like The Sims 2 provides, could add significant value.
Players also enjoy creating machinima videos of their exploits in WoW, including PvP, PvE, exploration, and choreography. WoW need only provide a central repository and in game access for these videos to begin the viewing/rating frenzy.
Players could even rate quests based on difficulty, interestingness, or reward. They could rate either professionally developed quests or player-created quests outlines. WoW developers could then implement the highest rated player-created quests after some time, rewarding the best creators and inspiring the next round of contributions.
Any time players can contribute something that others will see and rate, personal and social relevancy increase. Players will want to contribute their best work, and will strive to become more masterful at producing that work. Also, seeing one's rating change over time creates a new status in the game world that one wants to check in on frequently. Just as blog writers enjoy checking who links to their articles, so too do players enjoy seeing the results of other players praise and criticism. And, seeing feedback increases personal and social visibility of mastery. Players who contribute something that others find valuable will experience increased self presence in the selves based on masterful contributions. They will continue to invest in those selves.
Player v. Player Combat
Most of the activities described thus far support mobile extensions because the asymmetric capabilities of PCs and mobiles support, or at least don't hinder, each other. By asymmetric platform capabilities I mean that PCs have mice, keyboards, large screens, lots of processing power and storage, and high bandwidth, whereas mobiles have portability and players always carry them. PvP combat seems to require perfectly symmetrical platforms. After all, PvP relies on reflexes. Even asymmetric latencies or frame rates can cause an unfair advantage for one player over another. Should mobile players stand on the sidelines then during PvP?
If we take advantage of the asymmetries of PC and mobile, we can design an asymmetric activity that includes players on both platforms fairly. Despite traditional PvP benefiting from symmetric platforms, avatar abilities have always varied. PvP generally includes players in a range of 10 levels (20-29, 30-39, etc.) players at the lower end of the range are intrinsically underpowered. Even at the same level, avatars that have rare, expensive equipment perform better than normal avatars. In fact, when players reach the level cap, the main factor differentiating their performances besides skill is the rarity of their equipment. Players stay invested in this competition despite the asymmetries because they know they can always increase their power within this social structure by investing more time into the game. Teams can always increase their efficacy by choosing players who fill the right roles and practicing coordinated combat. In both cases, players feel they have the power to achieve greater success through effort.
Within this view of PvP combat, adding mobile players to the activity with unique roles could maintain perceived fairness. What would these roles look like? They must be significantly different from the roles of PC players, due to the platform asymmetries. They should minimize dependence on reflexes, compensating for interface and bandwidth efficiencies. They should minimize dependence on graphics, since mobiles have small displays. They should constrain the range of choices, again due to interface limitations, offering players a small set of options to consider at any time.
These design principles lead to a number of possibilities for integrating mobile players into PvP. Mobile players could serve as strategists, guiding their teammates with information and advice/orders about the best way to proceed. Mobile players would need to provide information particular to the current situation, so teammates couldn't simply read and memorized the best strategies ahead of time. In other words, unless the information provided is time-sensitive or highly personalized, it may be easily accessible through some web resource like wowwiki.com and thottbot.com. Certain kinds of information cannot be found there, however, creating opportunities for mobile player to make a meaningful contribution. To strategically coordinate Battlegrounds PvP matches, mobile players need access to different information than PC players have already. A mobile player could see a 2D map (like WoW's minimap) representing player locations and 
movement, flag locations ( Warsong Gulch, left), and territory controlled ( Arathi Basin, right). Using this map, mobile players could determine weak points in their teams' and their opponents' teams' defenses. They could advise what the best plan of attack might be. They could order particular players to adjust position or ready certain spells. They could advise which controlled territory may soon be lost and which territory might be easily taken.
All of this advice requires communication within teams. Mobile players could make the largest contribution with high-bandwidth communication like voice chat. Visual aids like drawing circles and arrows on teammates' minimaps could help as well. Even just bringing teammates' attention to a particular spot on the map could help, as in Warcraft III.
In addition to providing strategy, players will want to make a direct impact on the battlefield. To overcome the hardware and interface limitations, we will want as little time pressure as possible. Mobile players could deploy features already in the game, like buffs on teammates and curses on opponents. They might get only a limited number of these (like The Violet Sector limits moves), or have a long cool down timer requiring them to wait for a while after casting a spell (pseudo-real-time like Final Fantasy VII ). These constraints would encourage mobile players to think more strategically and rely less on reflexes. Along these lines, the buffs and curses should last longer and be weaker than those cast by PC players, again to emphasize strategic thinking and compensate for latency.
Given the rate at which players get killed on the battlefield, even strategic buffs and curses wouldn't last long. Mobile spells could last beyond death, so that the whole nature of the battle slows down from the mobile interaction perspective. Alternately or additionally, mobile players could affect the actual battlefield instead of players. Mobile players could get spells that last for a long time, but affect players only while they stand within a certain area. They would need to redeploy these spells to different areas as strategic needs change.
Perhaps only mobile players could affect other mobile players. They could get spells that undo each other's effects or take each other out of play for some amount of time (as death does with PC players). They could mislead each other with false information on the strategic map. In other words, to make mobile players more relevant to both teams, mobile could counter mobile more effectively than could PC players.
All of these hooks for mobile players into PvP increase mastery motivators, presence, and self construction. By feeling included in this important and exciting activity in WoW, players feel increased personal relevancy. Playing as part of a team in a valued support role increases social relevancy and visibility. Abilities that let mobile players observe and affect the battlefield increase both kinds of physical presence, since players feel more located in the virtual space and experience it as valid. Real-time interaction with teammates and opponents increases copresence, whether through communication or affecting players or the battlefield. Contributing to the team in a unique role strengthens self presence, enabling deeper and more lasting construction of selves.
In spite of all of these benefits, adding mobile players to PvP has one major drawback. PC players may sometimes feel compelled to play with their mobile even while sitting at the PC, simply to obtain the abilities mobile gives them. If one team has a mobile player and the other team does not, someone from the second team may feel compelled to switch from PC to mobile to achieve greater balance. Interacting with the game through mobile with the PC available seems wasteful and could frustrate some players. How do we solve this? Allow PC players to take on the same role as mobile players from their PCs. The role, by its nature, is limited by mobile constraints. PC players in mobile roles wouldn't get extra information, and their more advanced hardware wouldn't help them perform better. They would simply get to transition roles without switching platforms, and they could view the strategic map in a more attractive but equally functional form. Balancing the mobile role across platforms would take careful tuning, but could practically be achieved.
Single Player
One model for extending WoW to mobile that works less well is creating a single player activity that then feeds back into the multiplayer world. Ragnarok Online did this very poorly with Ragnarok Mobile Mage. The mobile version created a single-player activity where one could build up money to then transfer back to the PC-based multiplayer game. Because the mobile game was so poorly designed, I can't rule out the possibility that a well-designed version could strengthen mastery motivators and further enable self construction. However, the possibilities for that seem limited.
WoW supports many activities that require only one player but take place in a multiplayer space. The game's designers could have reduced bandwidth requirements by making all of these activities entirely single player, cutting players off from each other. However, they understood the value of feeling as though other players are nearby and could observe or interact with you at any time. They understood the value of social presence, especially copresence. By making the mobile activity single-player, copresence disappears. If designed properly, asynchronous social presence could persist.
Disconnected, single-player mobile play could add value in the short term. It could reduce costs and allow play where a connection cannot be established. However, without those external obstacles, which lessen every year, the ideal design includes constant connection.
Conclusion
These are just some of the ways in which WoW could be extended to mobile. The first MMO to achieve a polished experience with these or other mobile aspects will create a system in which players can construct more meaningful selves. Players want this badly.
