What are Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games?
MMORPGs are computer games in which many thousands of players may participate simultaneously from around the world, in virtual environments that endure and change whether an individual player is signed on or not. For the player, the vast communal environments of MMORPGs make them psychologically and socially very different from games played alone or with a partner on consoles such as Sony X-Box, PlayStation or Nintendo Wii. I have chosen to focus on MMORPGs because I believe they have been given a bad rap, often lumped together with less social games. Anecdotally, I’ve heard psychologists and counselors dismiss them as a waste of time at best, and a serious addiction threat at worst. I have even heard Multiple User Domains (MUDs) like MMORPGs referred to as “Multiple Undergraduate Destroyers”. In the MMORPG, each player chooses a fictional character, or “avatar”, whose appearance and activities he or she controls. Most MMORPGS are progressive, meaning that characters advance their skil
