[Air-l] Greetings and Games

[Lisbeth Klastrup]

Hi Federico,
Like you, I have been studying Massive Multi-player worlds and Virtual
worlds as part of my ph.d. thesis and I have found it rather difficult to
trace academic literature on the subject, apart from Yee's studies. However,
the last couple of years a number of interesting articles have been produced
and published in various contexts, here is some of them off the top of my
head (if you find more, I like to hear about them!):

Susana Tosca: The EverQuest Speech Community in "Computer Games & Digital
Cultures Proceedings", Tampere University Press, 2002. These proceedings
also contain other studies of EverQuest by Klastrup and Eddo Stern and an
article by Julian Oliver titled: "The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public
Space in the MMORPG." The proceedings can be bought online.

Sue Morris (of www. gameculture.com) has published some short articles on
online gaming communities too, however focusing more on FPS games. They are
available on her site.
T. L. Taylor has also published several interesting articles on virtual
worlds, they are available on her site.
Michael Jacobsson of School of Art and Communication, Malmö also have
published several articles on virtual worlds, available at
http://www.informatik.umu.se/%7Emjson/

Järvinen, Heliö and Mäyrä have published a very interesting prestudy report
titled: "Communication and Community in Digital Entertainment Services",
available at
http://tampub.uta.fi/tup/951-44-5432-4.pdf
- it outlines a framework of analysis for online multi-player games and
contains an analysis of Dark Ages of Camelot

Finally, you might want to take a look at "The Social Life of Avatars:
Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments", Ralph Schroeder
2002, Great Britain: Springer-Verlag.

best,
Lisbeth Klastrup, Denmark.



> I am in the preliminary stages (read: literature collection) of research
> project regarding the psychology of, and construction of community in,
> MMORPGs (Massively Muliplayer Online Role Playing Games). I was
> wondering if anyone knew of any academic studies of online gaming (in
> any context, not limited to the ones I described).
> Federico de Gregorio