Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), which allow simultaneous participation of several gamers, have attracted a great deal of attention recently. Since MMORPGs can be categorized as a type of online community, the behavior of MMORPGs users needs to be considered as the general behavior in online communities. However, previous studies of online communities did not pay enough ...

Online worlds have become a fundamental element of the virtual landscape. The development of MMORPGs has helped give credence to the idea that online spaces can support valid social communities. Having proved that these communities exist, scholars must now decide whether these communities are different to those in the 'real' world. What makes gaming communities stand out? This paper looks at ho...

In the Game Studies field, the study of MMORPG’s have been approached by four mayor research traditions: social aspects tradition, individual player issues, narratological themes and ludological themes. Although these are not mutually exclusive, focusing in one or two aspects of MMORPG’s usually means omitting elements of other themes. One fundamental theme that has been usually ommited is that...

With the rise of the Internet, the new phenomenon of problematic use of online games has emerged, particularly with the popular genre of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Currently, there are a growing number of reported cases of problematic MMOGs use and related negative outcomes. Though the concept of problematic MMOGs use has received considerable attention in the psychology commun...

In this talk I review the present status of neutrino masses and mixing and some of their implications for particle physics phenomenology.

Along with increasing the warranty period for complex systems, reducing the warranty servicing costs has become an issue of great importance to the manufacturers. One possible way to reduce the expected warranty servicing cost is by making sound decision on the product warranty and maintenance strategies. Therefore, warranties (basic warranty and extended warranty) and maintenance (corrective a...

Instrumentation to automatically log information – so called gameplay metrics – about the player-game interaction has become an important tool for analyzing player behavior in games. However, due to the usually large amount of gathered data, analysis of the collected data can be challenging. Visualizations have become a promising addition to statistical techniques to explore and better understa...

In this study, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) developed a quantitative-qualitative mixed methods research technique to investigate the extent to which real world characteristics of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) players can be predicted based on the characteristics and behavior of their avatars. SAIC used t...