Group items tagged

"Regular readers know that I don't play many massively multiplayer online games, but it turns out you don't need to be a fan of the genre to get something out of Mr. Andrews' book. In addition to providing advice on how to forge a guild's identity, offering guidance in recruiting reliable people who are a good match for your guild, and giving tips on how to equitably distribute loot gained from raids, he also delivers insight into the people who invest significant chunks of their lives playing online games and the communities they create for themselves. "

"Kellen's auction is just one example of how increasingly popular online role-playing games have created a shadow economy in which the lines between the real world and the virtual world are getting blurred. More than 20 million people play these games worldwide, according to Edward Castronova, an economics professor at Indiana University who has written a book on the subject, and he thinks such gamers spend more than $200 million a year on virtual goods. One site, GameUSD.com, even tracks the latest value of computer-game currency against the U.S. dollar, an exchange-rate calculator for the virtual world."

"Sociologist and director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation, William Sims Bainbridge spent 2300 hours entrenched in popular MMO World of Warcraft, looking for look for insights about Western civilization. What did he find there?"

"In their continued quest to plumb the mysterious depths of human interactions, some sociologists have stopped watching people-and started watching their avatars. And the US government is paying them to do it. While playing World of Warcraft and traipsing through Second Life might not sound like traditional academic disciplines, they are increasingly important for research into virtual communities. This burgeoning subdiscipline even has its own publication, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. What gets studied? Gold farming, "goon culture," griefing, entrepreneurial activity, intimacy, even "The Visual Language of Virtual BDSM Photographs in Second Life," which appeared in the most recent issue of the journal. "

"Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work. We don't normally think of games as hard work. After all, we play games, and we've been taught to think of play as the very opposite of work. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, as Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, "The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression.""