General Impressions:
MMOGs have great potential to be used as serious games. They involve aspects from online communities and group cognition. They can be very motivating and addicting to play. The Ducheneaut article below studies World of Warcraft and explains some of the game player dynamics and how things like reputation play out in a MMOG.
D. Suthers summary raises the question: If longevity of gaming communities is a problem (I agree- gamers jump around to new games as they are released and get tired of the old ones), how might we create something with longevity that could have time to flourish in an educational environment?
The Nick Yee article points out some of the user motivations for playing MMOGs. He states that these are 'more than games'- there is so much going on there, that it's very different than the traditional simplistic idea of a game. Complex social phenomena happen in MMORPGs- such as in avatar selection, group formation, and social interactions (such as marriages and other socio-cultural events in MMOGs).
Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Nickell, E., and Moore, R. J. 2006. "Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 407-416. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1124772.1124834
[D. Suthers] Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) routinely attract millions of players but little empirical data is available to assess their players' social experiences. In this paper, we use longitudinal data collected directly from the game to examine play and grouping patterns in one of the largest MMOGs: World of Warcraft. Our observations show that the prevalence and extent of social activities in MMOGs might have been previously over-estimated, and that gaming communities face important challenges affecting their cohesion and eventual longevity. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of future games and other online social spaces.
Yee, N. (2006). The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments. PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15, 309-329. http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20-%20MMORPG%20Demographics%202006.pdf
Hagel, J. (2007). Gaming and learning. Edge Perspectives with John Hagel. Retrieved January 23, 2007, from http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2007/01/gaming_and_lear.html
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001539.php
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