First, let's consider how to classify this game using Newman's adaptation (2004) of Caillois' work: commonly refered to as a MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game), it falls into the mimicry category. Furthermore, because it has specific objectives, it is primarily a ludus even though some players might use, as I later discovered, would mainly use it freely, as a paidea instead.
Once the player has been introduced to the history of the race he belongs to, thereby learning about how he/she may consider acting in the game world, he is taken to his village of origin. The interface scaffolds him so that he gets to know its basic features as he/she comes to need them: then, he quickly takes his first quest.
Basic fighting features
I tried two characters (a gnome belonging to the mage class and a tauren belonging to the druid class) and in both cases, my first quest involved killing a couple of weak creatures around the village. This gave me a basic knowledge of my weapons, all the while guided by relevant notifications.
Besides finding it relatively non-threatening (for both my real and virtual world identities), the beginning of the game starts stimulating the imagination of the player, thanks to the quality of the experience it provides on both technical and artistic (including the story itself) levels. As an aside, the efforts made so as to avoid disrupting the flow of the experience must really have been considerable given the technical demands of such a game.
Screenshot: a few safe quest to get the hang of the game
Exploring the world
The second task I took as a mage (again, I later noticed taurens were required to do the same) made me explore the neighbourhood to apply and develop the basic fighting abilities I had previously learned.
As Greenfield underscores, many games promote spatial-visual skills (1984, p. 104-107) but this may be even more relevant for vast 3D virtual worlds. In effect, not only can the player move in the world but he also has a map to help him.
In my opinion, it makes this skill more explicit, in the sense that the player is well aware of the ability at play: the consciousness of the process, emphasised by the way the mini-map works, may promote transfer to orientation in the real-world.
Although the real-world requires the additional step of working out the direction one is moving towards, the next steps involved (knowing whether to move right or left depending on our direction compared to the location to reach and the distance separating us from it) gave me the same feeling as when I try to find my way in a big city or on a mountain track.
As those two examples illustrate, one quest effectively requires the player to apply the "theoretical" knowledge and/or skills acquired during previous ones, often adding a new element to it.
Furthermore, this scaffold always seems to be at the right level of challenge: the user will have to think before acting but, eventually, he/she will most likely have the require resources (or will know how to get them) to succeed.
Interestingly, playing this kind of game, due to their nature, makes explicit the metaphor of learning as an adventure, proposed by Flery on the Understanding Learning course (metaphor which most of us found to be the most convincing). Beyond this easy observation, there is evidence (learning principles of the game) which suggests that it may effectively make quality learning possible...
References:
Greenfield, P. M. (1984). Video games. In Mind and media: the effects of television, video games, and computers. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Newman, J. (2004). What is a video game? Rules, puzzles and simulations. Videogames. London, Routledge.
World of Warcraft (2009). MMORPG game. Blizzard Entertainment.
Keywords: e-learning, IDGBL2009, video_game, virtual_world, WoW