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Abstract Virtual worlds give us the opportunity to explore another self, a virtual character of the real life you. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) have become extremely popular over the last decade. It has also grown into a lucrative business. To keep the players, the game needs to be more than just a game. This study aimed at finding out what factors that determine which features of the character creation interface that are most important to players. The following research question was formed; "Which underlying factors affect how important different features of the character creation interface are to experienced MMORPG players? To be able to answer the question an extensive literature review was conducted. A qualitative approach was taken. Long interviews were made with five participants, two female and three male players. The interviews took place while they created a number of avatars in different MMORPGs. The interviews were then followed up. During the follow-ups, the impact the character creation process had for the players, were discussed. The findings indicate that the character creation interface is important for the players to get a good gaming experience. However different types of players require different things. Important features for the users to change were mainly; the head; the name; and adding parts of yourself on your character. The factors that determined the importance of these features were found to be; Player types; Identity types; Immersion levels; and whether or not the game or the gaming experience were new to the player. Another finding showed that the longer you have played a game the less bizarre the different races, classes and gender will seem. The study also indicated that the female participants had a hard time identifying with their male characters."

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have great potential as sites for research within the social and human-computer interaction. In the MMORPGs, a stability player taxonomy model is very important for game design. It helps to balance different types of players and improve business strategy of the game.

Excerpted in Google Books, Published November 2012."Join videogame industry veteran Michael Thornton Wyman on a series of detailed, behind-the-scenes tours with the teams that have made some of the most popular and critically acclaimed videogames of the modern era. Drawing on insider's perspectives from a wide variety of teams, learn about the creation of a tiny, independent game project (World of Goo), casual game classics (Diner Dash, Bejeweled Twist), the world's most popular social game (FarmVille) as well as the world's most popular MMORPG (World of Warcraft), PC titles (Half Life 2) to AAA console games (Madden NFL 10), and modern-day masterpieces (Little Big Planet, Rock Band, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves). Hear directly from the creators about how these games were made, and learn from their stories from the trenches of videogames production. This book is an excellent resource for those working directly on game design or production, for those aspiring to work in the field, or for anyone who has wondered how the world's greatest videogames get made."

Abstract: "HCI scholars have been among those attracted to the study of online, computer-supported gaming. "Big Data" approaches, which analyze electronic traces left by game play, are an increasingly popular way to study it. This paper identifies basic epistemological problems in some such approaches, focusing on those that implicitly depend on the assumption that game play is fundamentally the same as other social activity. The paper explains why this and related assumptions are questionable, and why these Big Data approaches cannot establish their validity on their own. The paper then reports some results of a preliminary ethnographic study of Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), in order to illustrate a way that ethnography can provide an initial purchase on how the underlying similarity/dissimilarity issue can be studied. It concludes by explaining how methodological triangulation, involving a dialectical discourse between ethnography, on the one hand, and Big Data and similar approaches, on the other, may be able to place Game Studies on a firmer epistemological foundation. It is the attempt to achieve such significant objectives, in particular to justify a foundational critique of a major new development in Game Studies, and to do so in a single paper, that justify inclusion of the paper in alt.chi. "

"paper discusses the question of how game designers can keep their games fair when adding collaborative content and rewards. The paper presents findings from World of Warcraft in-game chat transcripts and data gathered through an online survey that was placed online for approximately 9 months during 2010. From the chat transcripts, we find that players sometimes do abuse mechanisms for collaborative content, which displeases the other players involved. We also find that players believe that there needs to be some kind of sanctioning mechanism to players that abuse grouping mechanisms. Finally we present suggestions to game designers on how to create sanctioning mechanisms based on human cooperation research."

Abstract : "This paper explores how supernormal stimuli may have contributed to the remarkable popularity of several types of video games: first-person shooters (FPSs), massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and Minecraft. Human culture, technology, and environments have advanced so rapidly in the last 10,000 years that the brains of Homo sapiens have not been able to keep up. Humans survive in the modern world, but still retain a mind stuck in the Pleistocene. Supercharged representations of ancient stimuli, which appealed to prehistoric human ancestors in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), appear in many video games and may be hyper-stimulating humans' adaptive instincts. These supernormal stimuli appear to correlate with the remarkably engaging, pleasurable, and satisfying experiences human players derive from playing these games. This paper goes on to propose that greater recognition of the potential of supernormal stimuli, and experimentation with the creation of virtual worlds stand to improve not only digital games, but the way in which humans live, work, and play in the real world."