A Gameful Organizational Assimilation Process: Insights from World of Warcraft for Gamification Design

A central process of virtual organization design relates to how newcomers are assimilated into organizational dynamics. Research on organizational assimilation has traditionally investigated "serious" organizational contexts. Nonetheless, video games can offer insights on how such assimilation can be effectively supported. In this article, I propose to look at World of Warcraft (WoW) to understand how individuals can be successfully integrated into online organizations. Through an ethnographic research, made up of participant observation and 36 semi-structured interviews, I explore how specific game design elements support organizational assimilation into WoW raiding guilds. This shows how designers elicit extremely engaging organizational dynamics that encourage players to identify with their organizations. Based on these findings, I propose design considerations for gamifying virtual organizations that draw from the structure of WoW raiding guilds.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.