1/ To explore! Going to different MMO’s is like travelling. New worlds to see, place to visit, people to meet. Each one is unique and different.

2/ To socialise! I like recruiting, running instances/dungeons and grouping.

As a player I can’t change the world, but being part of a great guild, running in a raid team makes me feel I’m having an impact on other people’s lives. As a founding officer in my WoW guild I’ve given a lot to the people in my guild. It’s been going for *four* years now with the same core of people.

Ultimately I play MMO’s for the community.

Oddly enough, I tend to have more fun when things don’t run so smoothly.

I find programmed NPCs with their canned stories rather dull. Sometimes they can be amusing, or interesting storytelling devices, and a really well written plot can get me to engage with them but I don’t play MMOs to interact with NPCs.

I started MUDding because, like any form of entertainment, it was escapism from daily responsibilities. In college, I especially enjoyed being able to play in worlds that I was fond of from books, like DiscworldMUD or Lost Souls MUD (which pulled a lot from fantasy literature.)

Later, I enjoyed coding new content in MUDs and spent more time writing and less time playing. I liked hanging out in the basement lab of the computer science building, MUDding with the guys between CS assignments. There was, and still is, a culture to gaming. I’m part of the first generation of computer gamers. Now as a mom and wife, I play MMOs to hang out with my friends, and for intellectual stimulation. I’m a theorycrafting, spreadsheet-loving geek and MMOs feed that.

Players Who Suit MUDs a landmark paper written by the esteemed Dr. Richard Bartle. The paper covers the four types of players he observed: Achievers, Explorers, Killers, and Socializers. Bartle expanded this in his book Designing Virtual Worlds.

The Daedalus Project by Nick Yee. Contains more empirical evidence collected from surveys. It used Bartle’s work as a starting point. I think there’s a bit of selection bias based on the games he chose (notably EQ after it was several years old), but he has data whereas Bartle only used observation and speculation.

Personally, I’m like Andrew: I play games at different stages in my life for different reasons. I played MUDs in college because the concept of a game I could play with people from around the world was just cool. It also touched the game designer in me I had been ignoring for a while once I got the opportunity to start coding on MUDs. I would probably not be a game designer without MUDs in college giving me some practical work.

These days I play remain social with my friends and to explore game mechanics in games that I might be able to synthesize into interesting gameplay for the projects I work on. I don’t play much for “pure enjoyment” anymore, but I still manage to have some fun.

http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-i-play-mmos.html

At base, I suppose you could say I play for both the social interaction as well as meaningful progress. I play single player games for the story, but I never feel the need to get the best items or anything like that because they don’t matter. Everyone who plays will be able to do the same thing. MMORPGs give me the opportunity to actually impact the world in which I play (or at least give me the impression that I do) with quanitifiable progress that seems to “mean” something more than just a “YOU WIN!” screen after the main boss.

The social interaction thing is the most important, I’d say. I play WoW only because I have friends there. I like other games better, but my friends don’t, so I want to be social and keep up with friends who live far away. The overall WoW community is nowhere near as good as the other MMOs I’ve experienced, but the cliques and small groups are really where the interaction occurs, and that’s where WoW excels.