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Hmm...let's try that survey link again.

out of curiousity, did you research the responses to the last survey thread in here? It is fairly close to the top, so it's not hard to miss.

They actually offer a class called "Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer Online Games" in college now? My Gawd, whatever happened to English, art and the hard sciences?

Never mind, bottom line is no one here (or hardly anyone) wants to participate in these kinds of college games... we have been bombarded with offers for years and seem to get a few new ones with each new semester.

Meantime, I think your best bet would be to commit to some real work and not lean on gaming for an easy grade. Don't worry, you probably still have time to drop the course and enroll in one where you will actually learn something valuable during your three hour a week investment.

Old Blue Dragon,

At the outset, I want to acknowledge that there are many people who recruit interviewees in gaming forums such as this one. Often, the researcher asks for participants and then fails to share their results when the study is completed. This sort of "hit and run" research is terrible for the community of legitimate games researchers. For this reason, students in the class at Trinity University are always very conscientious about publicly posting and sharing their findings. You can see examples of previous student work at:

http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/students.html
http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/worlds/students.html

By the end of December, all the student papers from this semester's class will be posted at:

http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/vanguard/students.html

You suggest that "hardly anyone wants to participate in these kinds of college games," but this simply isn't true. Over the years, thousands of gamers have taken time to speak to researchers about their experiences in social virtual worlds and MMOs. These gamers choose to share their thoughts because they believe that such research is intrinsically worthwhile.

You also imply that Meaghan's gaming class is a pathway to an easy grade. This is certainly not the case. As you can see from the reading list (http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/vanguard/readings.html), the students have grappled with ideas in nearly two dozen peer reviewed articles that explore different aspects of gaming subcultures. At the end of the semester, they are required to produce (and post) a lengthy, structured paper that meets rigorous methodological and ethical standards for social science research.

Writing about the work produced in a previous iteration of this course, Richard Bartle (the scholar and game designer who co-authored the first virtual world in 1978) commented in Terra Nova that the papers were refreshing and insightful. "If I didn't tell you that they were written by undergraduates, you might have had a hard time figuring it out from the content," he wrote. Bartle added, "What impressed me the most about this set of papers is that I've read below this standard in conference proceedings.”

Several students have ended up publishing their work from the games course. Manny Alvarez's article "Second Life and school: The use of virtual worlds in high school education" was recently published in an anthology of essays titled Virtual Reality: Concepts and Applications. Nick Nobel's paper "Aesthetics and gratification: Sexual practice in virtual environments" was covered by the Guardian UK. Beth Cox's essay "Sexism in World of Warcraft" sparked a flood of attention throughout the blogosphere, and her subsequent Capstone research on racial representations in World of Warcraft was referenced by technology journalist Clive Thompson in an article for Wired Magazine. Finally, Katelyn Davies' excellent essay, "Addiction to virtual worlds: An enticing hobby or a social problem?" was included as a model APA-style undergraduate research paper in Anne Raimes' Keys for Writers: Fifth Edition.

You suggest that Meaghan should "drop the course and enroll in one where you will actually learn something valuable during your three hour a week investment." It's important to note that, in addition to the 3 hours a week of official course time, the students have devoted approximately 25 hours of their free time to the class by attending weekly class sessions in the evening. You might also want to hunt down a copy of Reeves, Malone and O' Driscoll's recent article for Harvard Business Review which argues that virtual worlds are an ideal environment for training "knowledge workers" of the future. (Note: It is in the May 2008 issue.)

Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions about the class. You can reach me at: adelwich@trinity.edu

Aaron Delwiche
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Trinity University

Edited, Dec 4th 2008 11:31am by carbonela

Hiyas Carbonela and Meagharina;

Please pardon the growchiness. Your request was one of the nicer (and well-written) ones we've seen and the class looks like a good one.

Please understand that we get a lot of posts for projects like yours, and the community here is rather jaded about them. Often the requests are thinly veiled phishing attempts (not to imply that yours is), which doesn't help the community be accepting when a polite, legitimate request comes along.

I hope you get lots of good data.

Don't keep it all bottled up inside, Stuge... tell us how you really feel...

And Dya... /shakes head
that was just mean!

To carbonela - I'll give you a smidgen of extra credit for coming to Meagharina's defense. Even an assistant professor carries some weight and coming here to defend the program was... nice of you. And while the arguments you posed are interesting, they do little to validate what appears (to me) to be a meaningless course and an utter waste of time.

Here's the thing... none of this is new ground. These students appear to be rehashing the same tired old topics that have been covered each and every semester since the release of EQ 10 years ago. (or maybe even before that) In any case, it's old news. Move on!

If you were in a math course would you be writing a paper based on the odds found in single deck blackjack? Of course not. It's been done to death.

To me, it all seems analogous to the jr. high school class whose lit teacher allows them to write book reports based on the movie versions of famous books.

To which I ask, why bother?




Edited, Dec 4th 2008 12:54pm by OldBlueDragon

Higher education is about critical thinking, and this a capability which can be applied to any number of topics, including video games and virtual worlds. You might think that students keep returning to the same topics, but many of their papers have contained unique insights and made useful contributions to the field. Each researcher comes up with different findings.

Dyadem, you have posted to this forum 4,918 times. Old Blue Dragon, you have posted to this forum 2,726 times. Clearly, you must think that this topic is important and worthy of discussion. So do the students who are asking your opinions.

Aaron

Dyadem - Allah's resident size queen??? :)

Because dismissing them politely obviously has never worked in the past. They keep coming back. And every time they come back and someone calls them on it carbonela comes here and tries to convince everyone on the validity of the course. Everyone rolls their eyes, one or two posters try to be diplomatic because they feel bad for them, they disappear and we don't hear from them again until the next semester of rubes get to this point in the course and bother the community again.

It's like admonishing a child who has been told not to run in the house several times. We were nice about it the first few times. Now they get yelled at and sent the corner for time-out.

Edited, Dec 5th 2008 10:23am by Stugein

locking them in closets do though

There is actually a class on MMoRPG's in college???

What a complete waste of 3 credit hours.











Does the OP wanna cyber?

I once took a semester of bowling.

Where do you suggest they go to get research data?