World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting rich and complex social interactions among well over 10 million players worldwide. In this study, we explore implications of the pervasive “lonely gamer” stereotype, which portrays online gamers as socially isolated and addicted young people, usually male, with few real-life (RL) social ties. This is the first study...

Live weight (LW) is a key and conventional indicator for monitoring assessing overall animal performance welfare, representing the progress through different physiological stages, while providing close indication of individual physical health status. Measuring LW in practice still, however, quite rare infrequent under commercial sheep farming conditions, mainly because sessions are time-consumi...

The virtual economy operates like the one in the physical world, which is realized by players with two functions–demand and supply, only using the form as avatars. Only that in virtual worlds, the prices of virtual items is decided by the players instead of by its quality or scarcity, so the player behavior analyses became an important tool to monitor the persistent virtual worlds. In order to ...

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting rich and complex social interactions among over 8 million players worldwide. In this study, we explore implications of the pervasive “lonely gamer” stereotype, which portrays online gamers as socially isolated and addicted young people, usually male, with few real-life (RL) social ties. This is the first study to di...

The paper reports research to identify and then reverse engineer what evokes a ‘wow’ emotional response in listeners of musical compositions. The results of this analysis have then been compared to a systematic innovation methodology built on the analysis of close to three million innovations observed from a wide spectrum of human endeavour in order to identify similarities and differences. The...

Virtual worlds, e.g. World of Warcraft (WoW) and RuneScape — have demonstrated huge economic potential. However, little empirical research has been conducted into players’ purchase behavior in virtual worlds. This research was designed to help gain a better understanding of factors influencing purchase behavior in virtual worlds by empirically developing and testing a conceptual model of purcha...