Working with Lancaster University

Mark Rouncefield at Lancaster University is also involved in this project.

Welcome

Hi and welcome to the new blog, Social Life and Online Gaming. This blog is intended to support a new research project at The University of Melbourne called Social Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (but that was too long for the title of this blog).

So what is this project about? Rather than write a new description, here is the introductory paragraph from a recent grant application on the topic (get ready for a wall of text):

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft are virtual worlds in which large numbers of people take part in cooperative and competitive game play. Players typically engage in a range of fictive activities such as hunting monsters, collecting gold and completing quests by guiding an avatar around a rich, graphically rendered, three dimensional world. Tens of millions of people current spend tens of hours every week in these virtual online environments. The implications of these deep levels of involvement by large numbers of people remain largely unknown. In addition, while much important research in the past has examined online social life in text-based environments, there are significant differences between these environments and MMORPGs. The implications of these differences for social interaction warrant further investigation. Empirical investigations of how people use and partake in these online games, and how they interact with others when they do so, are needed. Also needed are studies that examine the implications of deep involvement in these constructed worlds for a person’s other social engagements. In this project we will study the social interactions and practices of people who play World of Warcraft. This research will significantly contribute to our understanding of the forms of social life associate with MMORPGs. These games are paradigmatic of a broader array of emerging forms of social engagement that are mediated, either fully or partially, by technology. This research will further our understanding of these technologically mediated social relationships and their place in contemporary society.

This project has emerged from a number of collaborations, most notably with my colleague Greg Wadley, and work we have done on voice communication in virtual worlds. Much of that work is now wrapped-up in Greg's PhD research, titled, strangely enough, Voice Communication in Virtual Worlds. This work, and this ongoing collaboration, has provided many useful and sometimes tangential insights about social life and communication in online environments that I've been able to pull into the Social Life and MMOGs project.

The Social Life and MMOGs project is also an extension work done with another colleague, Michael Arnold, from the Arts Faculty at the University of Melbourne. I've worked with Mike for many years now on two projects; The Wired Homes Project and the follow on Connected Homes Project. Both were supported by ARC grants. They looked at the implications of information and communication technologies for social life, for the domestic environment of the home, and for the constitution of local neighborhoods.

I'll get around to linking the projects and people mentioned above soon.