Shocking study: MMO players are social
You can always count on scientists to confirm through painstaking study what most people can figure out using common sense. With that in mind, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that massively multiplayer games can "promote sociability and new worldviews."
The researchers said that games like Asheron's Call and Lineage act like coffee shops or pubs by "providing places for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home." Amazing! In other news, technologies like "electronic mail" and instant messaging act like letters and phone calls to connect people around the world. Intriguing!
The researchers also found that online games can expose players to people who are not like themselves, providing "that kind of social horizon-broadening has been sorely lacking in American society for decades." I guess meeting middle-aged men pretending to be young female elves is pretty "horizon-broadening," but not in the way I think most Americans are looking for.
For their next study, the two professors plan to look at the effect of actually talking to people on a person's social development.
