Andy’s New Media Blog

  I found last class to be really productive in terms of getting a group together and deciding some basic areas of interest for our project.  Before class I was doing some random exploring on del.icio.us and found a site called The Daedalus Project which does psychological surveys of vast numbers of massive multiplayer online games (MMO).  I’ve been a World of Warcraft addict since pretty much the very beginning, so doing a project on the social and psychological effects of online gaming would be really interesting to me.  The site has a great amount of information as well as links to academic articles about online gaming.  I also thought it would be a good starting place for project ideas because Abbie, one of my group members is a psychology major and will hopefully be able to add an extra level of insight to our work.

One major obstacle we quickly realized would get in our way is the fact that most commercial MMO’s  require an extraordinary amount of time as well as a monthly fee to fully enjoy.  Because of this, we are also going to do some work with Second Life, not only because it is more accessible to casual players than something like World of Warcraft, but also because it will hopefully offer us a good opportunity to create something cool in a digital world for the creation portion of our assignment.  Although I haven’t had the opportunity to install Second Life yet myself, I feel confident that once I jump in it will be difficult to not think of interesting project topics.  I also think it will be very interesting to compare some of the major differences between commercial games like WoW which are expressly competitive and offer little in the way of user generated content, compared to Second Life or other non-competitive online experiences that generally rely on users cooperating to make interesting new locales and objects.