Quote Originally Posted by Quanta View Post
Games are a bit different though. Nobody will hunker down and play a train wreck of a game unless:

1) it's otherwise well designed and fun, and if it's well designed and fun, it's difficult for it to qualify as a train wreck, or
2) it's so bad that you simply have to play it so that you can make fun of it.
It's not as a farfetched comparison, from a marketing point of view, as you may think.

Everything in WoW isn't designed just to be "fun", there are tons of MMORPGs there that are very well designed on the "fun" aspects, probably even better than wow. Yet they aren't as popular. Not even nearly.
This without mentioning that "fun" is relative to the target, and not an absolute parameter.

Reality shows are specifically designed to cater to the lowest common denominator of human behavioral patters, so they are enjoyed by a large demographic of people.

WoW is designed to appease the lowest common denominator of gamers. No matter if you're a third grader or a soccer mom that has trouble even with the wii or if you have a PC from world war 2, the majority of WoW's activity are designed so that you can thrive at the game, and when you "hit the wall" (on part of the endgame, that's a bit more challenging), you have invested too much into the game to quit.

It's a simple marketing strategy. To make something mainstream you design it so that it has the widest target possible. Of course such a wide target has it's disadvantages (the quality of the community is one, the extremely and childish generic backstory and art direction is another), but those disadvantages affect majorly only the most demanding and discerning of the customerbase. And those are the vast minority compared to a mainstream target.