Similarities Between Social Interaction in Online Gaming and Social Media

One of the most effective means of advertising for us whenever we have a promo for one of our games is to post it on the mobiusgames pages on Facebook and Twitter. We get immediate feedback from our friends and followers, much in the same way as in online games when someone posts something in general chat and everyone starts responding.  It’s as if social meda sites took the social model of online games and developed it for the general population.

I remember more than 10 years ago, back in the days of MUDs (or for those who weren’t born yet then: Multi User Dungeons), one of things I really liked about it was the ability to interact with people from all walks of life and from all over the world.

There was this entire database of people that you could access just by going online and connecting with them using different methods which are now also available in most social media sites.  I learned more about what it was like to live in Adelaide just by chatting with one of my guild mates than I probably would have discovered if I had gone there on a tour.

And then someone introduced me to World of Warcraft and I was exposed to an even LARGER database of people that I had access to (I played on Phoenix MUD and there were at most, probably 25 people online at the same time). 

I was intimidated at first when my lowbie shadow priest found herself in Darnassus, surrounded with all sorts of characters bustling about, too busy to pay any attention to a noob outfitted in scraps dropped from trash. 

Fortunately, someone took pity on me and showed me the ropes:  from organizing a party, to joining a guild, to figuring out addons, then finally, to the joyous wonders of raiding.   I learned most of what I know about WoW through friends I had met online and had never met in real life.  In other words, I built my entire life in the game just by interacting online with the people I had met in the game.

Small surprise then that with the advent of social media, I found it very easy to apply the social skills I had learned through playing online games to the different platforms that had become available to me.

To illustrate my case, I have listed below several examples of the correlation between World of Warcraft and Facebook.

Similar Social Interaction in WoW and Facebook