Can you imagine the most successful entertainment game ever, created by Blizzard, being a serious game? Well, I can. If you believe that World of Warcraft is purely about entertainment, you should stop reading here.

I have a confession to make – and it is a confession because I am ashamed of it. When I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 14, I immediately became an addict. My life became World of Warcraft 24/7, when I wasn’t playing it I was thinking it, when the servers were offline I was watching movies of it, I spend a minimum amount of time with my friends and worst of all – and the reason I quit – I felt bad that I was socially underdeveloped compared to other kids of my age. In other words, I had no girlfriend. And the moment I quit, I knew that I threw away the two years of my life that I played the game.

But now that I have grown up (a little), I have started to see things from a different perspective. These years might have not been as useless as I thought, I think I even have learned a great deal from this game! And lets start with just one of these: world economy. I will need to explain the economy in order to let you understand my point, so here comes the intense reading:

In a way, the world economy in World of Warcraft (WoW) is exactly same as the economy in our world. In WoW, money is rewarded after a player has killed a unit in the game world. A player can not only use this money to buy items that are necessary in order to advance through the game, he can also buy items that make the player more powerful. This can be done through an ‘auction house’, a marketplace in which players can purchase items by bidding on it or buy them out of the auction house for a higher price. Items are also dropped by units in the game, and because of their scarcity, these items could have a great value in the auction house. Players often hunt loads of units down in order to find valuable items that they can sell in the auction house, it is exactly like demand and supply.

Players also have the ability to choose between ‘professions’ that enable the player to craft different kinds of items, but because a player is never able to craft all the different kinds of items, another economy arises: players offering services to each other for small fees.

And then there is the underground market, which goes far beyond the game itself: buying in-game currency with real-world currency. Beside the Japanese companies ‘grinding’ (repeatedly killing the same enemies) for money and selling it in real world to real people and trading the money in-game, people even bought 3rd party software that would play the game for them and make sure the player would have a constant flow of income. Even today, years after the release of the first copies of WoW, Blizzard is still trying to ban all of these companies and programs.

If a player wants to become a strong and powerful player, he must know this complex system from the in- and outside to use it in a efficient way and to take an advantage out of it. And from my experience, almost all player in WoW know the drill.

Now that you know how the world economy of WoW works, I don’t think I have to tell you in what way it looks like our economy. Almost every part of the economy in WoW can apply to a part of the economy in our world. From the constant flow of money that players receive from their actions to the scarcity of items, from analyzing market behavior to selling your services, all these things can be translated directly to real-life examples.

But economy is not all. World of Warcraft contains one of the strongest forms of communities I have ever experienced. These so called ‘guilds’ are organized groups of people with hierarchies that have a shared goal, which can vary from ‘having fun’ to ‘raiding dungeons’ in order to become stronger as a whole. These communities demand things from players that no other game has ever achieved, including time, money for website hosting, taking effort to recruit other players, creating fair hierarchies and rewarding players for loyalty. Joining a guild is very much like a job interview, extremely difficult when you don’t have the experience, very easy if you have the right friends.

And another thing is the Player vs. Player (PvP) combat system. Players can team up with 1, 2 or 4 other players and be part of an ongoing competition between each other. In order reach the top in these competitions, you need a really strong team with an insane amount of experience. How to create and organize such a strong team is a tremendous effort.

There is so much to learn from World of Warcraft, dare I say more than any other serious game has ever learned anyone. And I believe World of Warcraft is not the only game that is teaching so many people. Games have the great ability to show players how certain systems work. If only the serious games market would focus on this fact instead of creating ‘educative’ games.