"Thursday morning's GDC Austin keynote was met with a large crowd as Blizzard Entertainment's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took the stage to offer a detailed look into the inner workings of the genre-dominating World of Warcraft."

"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."

"So here's my view: When a real person chooses an evil avatar, he or she should be conscious of the evil inherent in the role. There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act."

"For the past 8 months, we have been collecting and analyzing data from WoW. We use "bots" on 5 different servers (covering PvP, PvE and RP realms) and take snapshots of the population every 10 minutes or so (more detail here), capturing data about each present character's level, location, grouped status, and guild affiliation (among other things). So far, we have observed about 150,000 unique characters. While this data is far from perfect (after all, we are only getting what Blizzard is willing to let transpire through their API), it can still yield a surprising amount of insight into the social dimensions of multiplayer games."

"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."

"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."