Study of WoW and other MMORPGs at uniFollow

That thing is *long* you might get better results out of gamers by shortning it a bit.

I will contribute information as this seems to be one of the more interesting studies this community has been asked to participate in. Though I do feel like somewhat of a lab rat as late.

Done. Well put together survey.

I submitted one as well.



I lol'd at that too.

Very interesting survey, a lot of fun.

I call BS. How can you claim to be hooked on wow for two years but just making the first post here.

Hello, it's Chris here.

Many thanks for all who filled in the survey, I really appreciate it!

I'm from Edinburgh University, btw.

7.5 million warcraft players.

Maybe, MAYBE 15% (that's really stretching it) post on forums. I wouldn't doubt he's been addicted, started doing research for his University paper and found that this site is very popular for posters and for information so he figured this would be the best place to post. And who's to say he didn't find other forum sites and post there as well?

Good luck with the thing, and like Allegory said, post your results!

btw, if your paper is on social interaction in a virtual world (which it seems to be), I would highly recommend you look up a game called Second Life. It's kinda of the extreme in that direction. A website called somethingawful.com has been doing a number of satirical articles that mainly have to do with griefing some of the fringe groups of that game, but the most recent one has to do with cnet.com trying to do an interview in the game with one of the game's more well known personalities and the interview being attacked my griefers (not entirely unlike the funeral in WoW a year or so ago). Here's a more serious article about the 2nd life incident, if it helps you. http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/vandals-give-grief-to-second-life-residents/2006/12/21/1166290662836.html?page=2

Hi all, it's Chris here. I'll definitely post what i found out on the forum when I finish writing it, although it'll be about 10,000 words long, so I might just summarise it and put in the key points or something and put in a link to the study. Should be done in a few weeks with any luck.

I've played around in Second Life a bit, but I haven't had the time to get into it. It's interesting to see what happens when you take the violence element out of online games. I don't know who they're going to deal with griefing though, it's so easy to start up a new account and grief. Maybe they'll come up with more sophisticated reporting systems or something.
I'm really interested in the way Second Life works with rl economies. I remember they found out a couple of years ago they tried to measure the size of the Everquest economy. Taking a rough currency conversion rate through ebay, the estimated the everquest economy to have a higher GDP per person per year than a large number of countries, coming in at just above the GDP figures for India (I think- it's been a while since I've read the paper). Sure, it was just an estimate, and of course the Everquest economy is much smaller than India's, but it's still interesting. People invest a lot of time and effort into these games. In Second Life, you've got more sophisticated ownership rules, because you own what you create. I think it's one of the reasons it's been sucessful. I wonder what figures something as big as WoW would give...

Thanks for the Daedalus link, I'm a huge fan of Nick Yee. I've spent a lot of time reading the daedalus project as well as other papers he's written. I'm hoping what comes out of this research is new though.

Again, thanks for the feedback. I can't tell you how much it helps.

Chris

Hiya,

as far as game economies go, I think in many ways that the simplicity could actually be an asset. I stress here that I'm not an economist (although it does interest me as a suject), but with economics you often have to make number of assumptions that aren't completely true. An assumption made for certain simple economic models, for example, is that goods can be homogenous.

In real life this isn't the case, but in an MMORPG, it is. This means that you could study MMORPGs because in many ways they operate under some of the assumptions made for economic models. It might be possible, for example, to monitor an experiment whereby you could assume perfect homogeneity of goods, as well as perfect information in the marketplace. You could then see whether Marx's economic theories or Smith's were closer to the mark in this set of circumstances. Because the same map is being run maybe 30 or 40 times with different servers and different players present, it means that the experiments are repeatable.

Also, markets are often player-driven. Studies of EQ2 showed that you could use models (that took into account variables such as geography, war, demand and supply) that are used in real life to predict, reasonably accurately, where player markets would appear.

I completely agree though that there are differences, and that studies would have to be carefully tailored to each different game. There's a limit to how far you could take this approach, because your right, game markets are different.

I think you raise a good point about violence in games. But I think often when we use the word violence, we refer to physical violence. I would probably describe a James Bond movie as being more violent then an episode of a soap, say, even if the soap contained more verbal abuse.

I would argue, though, that WoW encourages an aggressive physical response towards the environment in gameplay. In this sense, it has violent elements. When you go into a dungeon, you often will have to band together because if you don't, your character will be attacked by monsters. The environments you travel in are often hostile, because creatures will often behave aggressively towards you. This encourages group interaction because players band together in reponse to this to triumph over the environment. I think Second Life will be interesting because you don't always have that environmental pressure caused by the threat of in-game physical violence against your character. Maybe players will band together against verbal abuse instead, as shown in the news article above.

I seem to have gone on a bit. Sorry, I do enjoy a good debate.