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Research and Real Games?
Jagosalmon
Member Posts: 2
HI,
I am a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin. I have been fascinated by MMORPG for a while and am thinking about trying to use it as a research tool. This could be the first social science "lab" we have ever had. Does anybody of previous research on MMORPG or of research centres? These games have all the information we should need to understand how large numbers of individuals act and think.
MOre mundanely do you know of any real life games - no science fiction or fantasy just a game about getting on with normal life in a business or day to day. A historical civil war game would be interesting - you choose whether to fight or to make money of the sides fighting, to flee or to become a bandit.
Jago
Comments
Summary of how large numbers of mmrpg gamers think: give me loot!, I pwned you!, my class sucks!, nerf that other class!, SOE sux!, Blizzard sux!
Hope that proves helpful for your data.
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Played: Asheron's Call 1, Dark Age of Camelot, Earth & Beyond, Star Wars Galaxies
Tested: Asheron's Call 1, Asheron's Call 2, Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online, Lineage 2, Risk Your Life, Saga of Ryzom, World of Warcraft
Uninstalled ASAP: MU Online, Knight Online, Rubies of Eventide, Priston Tales, Star Sonata, DarkSpace
That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.
That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.
lmfao sadly that does cover it pretty darn well
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These are just my opinions, please direct your opinions of my opinions to your mama, not me and the other readers.
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[quote]Originally posted by Theely
[b]
lmfao sadly that does cover it pretty darn well
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[/quote]
Sad, but true.
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Malianea
You will have to account for the question of Anyonomity in your research, the internet and MMORPGs are anyonomous...Real life is not(as). This leads to a vastly diffrent behivor style for a large percentage of people. Most notably a small percentage of the population turns into griefers, they hurt others simply because they enjoy doing so; several analysis have been made, these are the same people who would turn to looting/pillageing after a natural disaster or political instability.
[b][quote]
MOre mundanely do you know of any real life games - no science fiction or fantasy just a game about getting on with normal life in a business or day to day. A historical civil war game would be interesting - you choose whether to fight or to make money of the sides fighting, to flee or to become a bandit.
Jago
[/b][/quote]
The only thing close to that was the origonal UO. Non pvpers don't like to play with PKs, and with a variety of choices they no longer choose to. Any game you can name that exists today and is open PvP will be filled with only one element - those people who like to randomly kill others.(Or at least mostly)
As for the first part, there are no real-life games currently on the market(There is a pirate simulator but it's only in Korean). All games now in existance have elements of fantasy, or are RL based but have no combat. www.atitd.net is an ancient egypt MMORPG but has no combat, being antisocial in that game(Which most people end up doing) involves competeing to achive quests rather than cooperateing. It is intresting to note that the quests in that game are set up in such a way that any single person who chooses to compete rather than cooperate forces everyone else in the game world to also attempt to compete. Attempts were made to cooperate....But someone always dosen't go along.
Some more thoughts:
An intresting avenue of research might be to compare real-life penalties for misbehivor and their psyological impact and ability to prevent abberant behivor and the various in-game methods that are/have been tried to control antisocial player behivor.
My hypothesis is that people do not psychologically value their time commitments as they do their health/well being/money/pain/life. People are willing to spend 100 hours to make a charecter just to grief with, even at risk of loseing those 100 hours of 'work'. As time is the only thing you can take from a player in a MMORPG this renders any ingame punishment mostly ineffective for the types of people who engage in it.
A study might be worth doing to see how much a griefer values his time as compared to a cooperative player, and weather that has influence on their perception of in-game punishments. I would not be suprised at all to find that griefers have some mental defect that prevents them from placeing value on their time. It may be a variety of psychological deficits that causes this typeof behivor....Inability to value time+ sadism + whatever.
Thus -> Their time is worthless -> You can not punish them. -> They revert to griefing.
For a while, I played a game at www.starwarscombine.com
The game was created as a college senior project. His thesis had something to do about managing an online mmorpg. I'm pretty sure his report is somewhere on the website. if not, email me in in mmorpg and I'll give you his email so you can ask him for a copy.