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MMOs and gaming psychology, part two: Interview with a researcher
Following yesterday's article discussing current research on psychology and MMOs, we have today our conversation with Dr. Rachel Kowert herself, the lead author on the paper that originally prompted these articles. Kowert, unlike many other researchers in her field, has established gamer cred; her earliest experiences were playing basic games on a Tandy computer with her brother, but the first game to really grab her was Super Mario Brothers. Her favorite game of all time is Final Fantasy 6 (Final Fantasy 3 in the US), and most recently she's played Banished and The Sims 4. Late in Kowert's Master's degree studies, her supervisor told her about an influx of parents expressing concern about their children's gaming habits. Finding information on the topic to help ease concerns proved difficult due to a severe lack of on-point research. This is what prompted her to switch her research focus to game studies.
MMOs and gaming psychology, part one: The research
Last month, Massively wrote a short article about research on the relationship between shyness and online game friendships. The topic is of interest to me not just because of the MMO connection but because I myself am someone who used to identify myself as shy but believe online games help me cope with and surmount it. Games are what I rely on to help myself meet new people as cultural and language barriers prevent me, an American, from making strong attachments in Japan, the country where I live and work. In preparing for this two-part article, I spoke to the research paper's lead author, Dr. Rachel Kowert, who helpfully provided me with a reader's digest version of recent research in this subfield of psychology. Tomorrow, we'll tackle our interview with Dr. Kowert herself, but today, we'll have a look at the research to bring us all up to speed.
Riot Games promises to increase diversity in League of Legends
League of Legends features a lot of diversity among its male champions, but the female champions all feature a fairly uniform body type. That's something the developers at Riot Games are keen on changing. In response to a fan question at SDCC, producer Omar Kendall said that the company has been introducing new ways of looking at body types and shapes, with the end goal of making female champions who don't look like the others. Kendall went on to specify that the call for more diversity is one that players should see represented soon in a new character coming out. He also noted that diversity is being strongly considered with further character designs and any new champions. Game designer Brian Feeney noted that it would be a net boon to the game as a whole -- as Riot is very concerned with distinctive silhouettes, a more robust selection of body types makes it easier to tell champions apart.
Twitch Plays Pokémon... beats Pokémon
When is a single-player game an MMO? When you hook it up to a chat parser and let everyone fight for controls, much like wrestling with five other people to play a single-player game. Twitch Plays Pokémon has garnered a great deal of attention based on its quirky premise and execution, but all good things must come to an end. After 16 days of play, the game has finally concluded with victory for the multitudes. The channel is currently counting down to something happening on Sunday morning. Will it be a restart? Another Pokémon title? An attempt to use a similar premise on another game? No one knows. (Most theories involve a restart or the next generation of Pokémon titles, though.) You can keep an eye on the page to see what happens next, or you can just enjoy one of the strangest stories of turning a single-player game into a multiplayer online one... even if it was just for half a month.
15 Minutes of Fame: Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi on WoW culture and art
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. We've written before at WoW.com and even here in 15 Minutes of Fame about attempts to study World of Warcraft culture from a sociological, psychological or anthropological point of view. In all of these cases, the researchers in question have logged time playing WoW as part of their research, albeit some with greater degrees of immersive success than others. So I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Bonnie Nardi, a University of California-Irvine expert in the social implications of digital technologies and author of the rather blithely titled My Life as a Night Elf Priest, not only rolled the token raiding character in order to observe the curious behavior of the raiding animal -- she actually enjoys WoW in its own right. Rather than cautiously sniffing WoW culture only to generate another wide-eyed, ZOMG-look-at-this-funny-lingo report from the digital field, Nardi dove deep enough to play in four different guilds: a casual raiding guild; a raiding guild composed of fellow academics; a small, casual guild; and her own friends-and-family guild. Our two-part interview with Nardi, packed with opinion and cultural analysis, reveals a witty approach to WoW culture that successfully combines academic insight with the familiarity of a seasoned player.
