Librería Portfolio

Features

Contains pertinent knowledge about online gaming: its history, technical features, player characteristics, social dynamics, and research methods
Sheds light on the potential future of online gaming, and how this would impact every aspect of our everyday lives - socially, culturally, technologically, and economically
Asks promising questions based on cutting-edge research in the field of online game design and development
Summary

Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) have become a new genre of ´play culture,´ integrating communication and entertainment in a playful, computer-mediated environment that evolves through user interaction. This book comprehensively reviews the origins, players, and social dynamics of MOGs, as well as six major empirical research methods used in previous works to study MOGs (i.e., observation/ethnography, survey/interviews, content and discourse analysis, experiments, network analysis, and case studies). It concludes that MOGs represent a highly sophisticated, networked, multimedia and multimodal Internet technology, which can construct entertaining, simultaneous, persistent social virtual worlds for gamers. Overall, the book shows that what we can learn from MOGs is how games and gaming, as ubiquitous activities, fit into ordinary life in today's information society, in the moments where the increased use of media as entertainment, the widespread application of networked information technologies, and participation in new social experiences intersect.



Table of Contents

Why Online Gaming Studies Now? What Are Multiplayer Online Games (MOG). Who Plays MOGs? Social Dynamics of MOGs. Methodologies for the Study of MOGs. New Phenomena, New Opportunities. Implications for Future Studies.