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"Climbing the scales at Digg this week is a story on How Stuff Works about World of Warcraft. Most intriguing was Section 2 of the article, entitled, "World of Warcraft Players." Here, author Tracy V. Wilson lists a variety of research efforts focused on WoW, currently the most popular MMORPG."

"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. "

"During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics."

"Together with some students from the University of Sheffield, we've done some research into World of Warcraft Gold USA, and what that tells us about the realm-by-realm economies of the European and American servers. What came out of the study was astonishing- and seems to indicate a phenomenal bias on behalf of Blizzard towards their American clients."

"MMOGCHART.COM is dedicated to my research in tracking the growth of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). The menu on the left is updated each version with new figures, charts, graphs, and my analysis. My work is wholly independent and free; if you find it useful please consider making a donation via PayPal. If you have any questions, desire an interview, wish to provide numbers, or would like to hire me to consult on a MMOG project, please feel free to contact me."

"The Daedalus Project was a long-running survey study of MMO players"

A researcher at University of California at Irvine got $100,000 from the National Science Foundation to study how Americans play the popular online game World of Warcraft

"Here's the PDF (4MB) of my dissertation:, submitted to the graduate school on September 2, 2010: Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice" Mark was "… a PhD student in Ed Tech at the University of Washington looking at digital games as a way to promote active participation in social contexts as well as my own personal narrative with games."

"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?"

"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.""

The study offers 3 key insights into the evolution of gaming (explained in more detail below): Games go beyond the screen Life becomes play Social matures into societal The study included a Web survey amongst 290 smartphone owners between the ages of 15-54 who self-identified as at least "casual gamers," with nearly half labeling themselves "game enthusiasts."* The survey assessed technology usage and future orientation, attitudes and behaviors around gaming, and possible interest areas for new game experiences.

"In the realm of online games, specifically massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), leaders emerge that deftly navigate the motivational, emotional and social needs of their direct reports in a highly competitive, distributed, virtual environment. And there are many lessons to be learned."

"Massively multiplayer online worlds (e.g., EverQuest or SecondLife) constitute a new form of social life that is ripe for social scientific study. Inhabitants of persistent virtual environments spend on average more than twenty hours per week logged on."

"WoW matters because it creates a powerful platform for learning, without a training program in sight. Many of the approaches used by WoW could be very helpful to business executives as they strive to improve performance more rapidly in their own organizations."