1. They took every lesson from every MMORPG before them, and put it into WoW. This means things like PvP flags, and not having death exact a heavy toll. This was not obvious to WoW's predecessors. Generally, Blizzard does not enter a market first, they wait, let others innovate, and then combine features into a heavily polished product crafted around an easily understood theme.
2. They reward human psychological tendencies to generate habits. This is done through staging a series of rewarding goals. The repetitive parts are not so repetitive that you lose sight of the goal. If the user can hold the goal in their mind and find achieving it satisfying, then a player will return multiple times to what is essentially the same task.
3. They capitalize off of the desire for novelty. Blizzard did a great job of establishing variance in terrain, music, audio, objectives, and creatures. Little touches like non-enemy animals roaming the land broke up the environment into a place that felt diverse enough to be real. Providing places with enough characteristics to endow unique identity made the place even more memorable. A heavily carpeted room, a place that emanated foreboding, or a bizarrely twisted tree. Places like that were memorable and this prevented them from entering into the tedium.
4. They struck the perfect balance between the feeling of work and play by fostering the social component well. Try playing WoW by yourself and with others. These will be very different experiences. One will eventually be a boring game, and the other will incorporate the pleasant grooming of conversation so well, you'll discover you're talking more than playing the game.
1. They took every lesson from every MMORPG before them, and put it into WoW. This means things like PvP flags, and not having death exact a heavy toll. This was not obvious to WoW's predecessors. Generally, Blizzard does not enter a market first, they wait, let others innovate, and then combine features into a heavily polished product crafted around an easily understood theme.
2. They reward human psychological tendencies to generate habits. This is done through staging a series of rewarding goals. The repetitive parts are not so repetitive that you lose sight of the goal. If the user can hold the goal in their mind and find achieving it satisfying, then a player will return multiple times to what is essentially the same task.
3. They capitalize off of the desire for novelty. Blizzard did a great job of establishing variance in terrain, music, audio, objectives, and creatures. Little touches like non-enemy animals roaming the land broke up the environment into a place that felt diverse enough to be real. Providing places with enough characteristics to endow unique identity made the place even more memorable. A heavily carpeted room, a place that emanated foreboding, or a bizarrely twisted tree. Places like that were memorable and this prevented them from entering into the tedium.
4. They struck the perfect balance between the feeling of work and play by fostering the social component well. Try playing WoW by yourself and with others. These will be very different experiences. One will eventually be a boring game, and the other will incorporate the pleasant grooming of conversation so well, you'll discover you're talking more than playing the game.