hello federico, would you mind telling me where to get Nicholas Yee's works? (in case you have them, as you said they are unpublished..) one site dealing with the psychology of mmorpgs is this one: http://www.nickyee.com/hub/home.html it seems to be quite extensive and features a big psychological study of everquest. hope that is of interest to you! cheers, Max Doelling Student @ IFS, FU Berlin ----- Original Message ----- From: federico To: air-l@aoir.org Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 2:04 AM Subject: [Air-l] Greetings and Games Hello to everyone. I'm a PhD student in Mass Communication at the University of Georgia and have just subscribed to this list. 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). I've only managed to find the works of Nicholas Yee regarding MMORPGs and Ever Quest in particular (but none of those have have been published anywhere despite being rather extensive). Any help/advice is much appreciated. Federico de Gregorio

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