We present the outline of a class project in which entry-level students in our CS1 course spent a full day developing a text-based massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) using Scheme. We describe briefly our CS1 course, the specifics of the game we asked students to implement, and the project organization. Comments from the students about their experience are also presented. M...

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.

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...