The world of warcraft has accumulated a ridiculous player population exceeding that of a number of small countries. This is a result of the general accessibility offered both by the mechanics of the game as well as the player community. Due to this, a large number of people who would not normally play mmorpgs have [...]

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When I first told my friends that I was taking a class about online worlds, and playing in these online worlds, one of the first things that came up was, “Don’t get addicted, I know lots of people who play those games all day long and do nothing else.” Other comments were, “All I have [...]

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As I roam through online games asking people questions about there avatars and play experience, I find on average an avatar really does tend to reflect a person’s personality. For example in WoW I have found players with outward appearance as threatening tended to be not as open to answering questions or helping me as [...]

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Blog Entry: Stereotypes Through my field work in this class I have been surprised time and time again by how wrong some of my misconceptions of the virtual worlds were. Having never been a gamer, I must admit that I was one of the people who imagined permanently adolescent males alone in mom`s basement leveling [...]

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In the last blog entry I talked about stereotypes and how they are affecting the mindset of MMO players. Today I am going to focus on what some of these stereotypes are and whether they are fact or fictional. Ask someone who’s never played a massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) what they think [...]

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“According to all reports, we are a legion of unwashed, relationship-phobic nerds living in our parents’ basements who converse entirely in binary. And, according to most educated news reports, we’re also one frustrating session of Call of Duty away from snapping and taking out a Wal-Mart with a heavily modified Nerf gatling gun.” Source Sounds [...]

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My first exposure to the world of MMOs was through a documentary produced by the CBC show Doc Zone called “Gamer Revolution.” The second part of this two-part series focused on the emergent culture of online games… only….lite. There were no anthropological theories brought on board or any real in-depth discussion of what virtual worlds [...]

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It has come to my attention that some rather large problems are happening within the area of studying games. It seems that social anthropologists are trying to hard to be “experts” and apply things that don’t really fit onto the players. the simple fact is that despite all of their social theories and ideas a [...]

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Recently on YouTube I came across a video which caught my attention in relation to this class. From the thumb nail I assumed that it would be another embarrassing nerd video such as “Star Wars Kid” but it turned out differently. The video takes place at Blizzcon 2010 during the Quests and Lore Question & [...]

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This is just a funny clip about MMO’s on The Big Bang Theory. In this episode, Penny becomes addicted to Age of Conan after a series of disappointments in her real life.

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