MMORPGs: Living With It or Living In It

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MMORPGsLiving With It or Living In It?
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• last updated September 2005

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PARENTS USE GAMING TO EXCUSE NEGLECT (June 22,
2005) An infant dies due to neglect. The parents
blame a longer-than-usual online gaming session.
.The infant had been left alone for hours
while the parents were out at a Internet café
playing the MMORPG World of Warcraft. When the
parents returned home, they found their daughter
and only child dead, due to suffocation. "We
were thinking of playing for just an hour or two
and returning home like usual... but the game
took longer that day," the couple told police.
(http//xbox.advancedmn.com/article.php?a
rtid5133)
SOUTH KOREAS GAMING ADDICTS (November 22,
2002) .An extreme case of internet obsession
hit the news headlines last month when
24-year-old Kim Kyung-jae collapsed and died
after playing computer games at an internet cafe
in the south-western city of Kwangju. He had
been playing virtually non-stop for 86
hours. (http//news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2
499957.stm)
CHINESE SUICIDE SHOWS ADDICTION DANGERS (June 3,
2005) . Xiao Yi was thirteen when he threw
himself from the top of a twenty-four story tower
block in his home town, leaving notes that spoke
of his addiction and his hope of being reunited
with fellow cyber-players in heaven .
Previously, Xiao's parents had found him starving
after two days and nights in an internet cafe
playing online role-playing games. When
questioned about his bizarre behaviour, his
father said that a tearful Xiao had told him that
he had been poisoned by games and could no longer
control himself. (http//www.ferrago.com/story/592
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CHINESE MMORPG KILLER GETS LIFE (June 9,
2005) Man who stabbed his mate in dispute over
virtual sword gets suspended death sentenceQiu
Chengwei, a hardcore fan of the Legend of Mir 3
M.MORPG, had lent his friend Zhu Caoyuan his
Dragon Sabre, a high level weapon. Zhu sold the
sword without consulting Qiu, making a healthy
profit of 7200 Yuan (approximately 425). When
Qiu found out he broke into Zhu's house and
stabbed him with "great force" in the chest,
killing him. (http//www.computerandvideogames.co
m/r/?pagehttp//www.computerandvideogames.com/new
s/news_story.php(que)id120210)
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MMOPTWGYEK what?

• Online on the Internet
• Company-owned / proprietary server
• Persistent world (rarely reset)
• Massive multiplayer (MM)

What sets MMOs apart from other games are their
social structures and communities. If you just
want to kill things and level up a character, you
can play Diablo. If you just want to wander in a
3D world, you can play Morrowind. If youre
simply interested in fantasy or sci-fi, there are
accomplished narratives like the Baldurs Gate
series or Knights of the Old Republic. But what
those games cant offer is a role in the complex
and evolving set of living social structures. In
MMOs, youll find guilds, role-playing servers,
warring factions, economic classes, crime rings,
griefers, political groups, and even entire
cities and nations. (GameSpy, Tom Chick, Oct 24,
2003)
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Still not sure what it is?
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History
1996 Meridian 59 coined massively multiplayer
Kingdom of the Winds
The Age of Transition (May 2001 April 2002)
The Golden Age (Jan. 1997 April 2001)
The Age of Competition (May 2002 Today)

• 1997 Ultima Online
• 1998 Lineage
• 1999 Everquest, Asherons Call
• Unrestrained Growth
• MMORPGs only
• online game revenues will grow from 277 million
  to 1.9 billion by 2002 (Forrester Research)

2002 Final Fantasy XI 2003 PlanetSide, Lineage
II, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies 2004 World of
Warcraft, Everquest2, City of Hereos 2005 Matrix
Online over 150 MMOG products in various stages
of development . the market over the next few
years can support 20 games, probably less (DFC)
2001 Dark Ages of Camelot, Anarchy Online, World
War II Online Significant Slowing of Growth New
MMORPGs New MMOG Genres
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Behind the Keyboard
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Demographics

• Average age 26 (only 25 are teenagers)
• Gender 85 are male ratio of men and women 51
• Male players tend to be between 12 and 28, while
  female players tend to be between 23 and 40.
• Men are 3-5 times more likely than women to
  gender-bend
• Occupation 50 are working, 22 are full-time
  students, 12 are working and/or going to school
  part-time, 10 are unemployed, 3 are
  home-makers, while 1 are retired.
• Marital Status 36 are married 67 of men 43
  of women have children
• 60 of female gamers and 16 of male gamers play
  with a romantic partner.
• (Daedalus Project at http//www.nickyee.com/daedal
  us/gateway_demographics.html)

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The Latest Subscription Numbers
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Breaking News
September 2005
World of Warcraft subscribers reach 4 million 
Wildly popular MMORPG hits another milestone 1
million active accounts in North America
alone. (Tor Thorsen, GameSpot, August 29, 2005,
http//www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/new
s_6132187.html)
See also Conqueror in a War of Virtual Worlds
by SETH SCHIESEL (New York Times, September 6,
2005)
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Even famous people play

• Bill Amend (Foxtrot) about his WOW playing
  habitsIt was about 11 pm on a Thursday, with
  my strips unwritten and due the next day, and
  instead of being in a healthy deadline panic, all
  I could think about was how my druid was about to
  hit level 20 and get the cat form ability. The
  strips pretty much wrote themselves at that
  point.
• Jacques Villeneuve on Everquest I carry a
  laptop around, which isnt great but allows me to
  keep in touch. I play when I would be reading.
  The only problem is that bed time always ends up
  later than planned (http//everquest.allakhazam.c
  om/news/sdetail136.html)
• Curt Schilling on Everquest.. On the road when
  my family doesn't travel I play every night, and
  usually very, very late. I have a Dell laptop
  that I play on. At home I play almost every
  night. Depending upon the circumstances,
  sometimes I can pull an all nighter )
  (http//everquest.allakhazam.com/news/sdetail91.ht
  ml)

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/played

• Hours of Play per Week (Nick Yee)
• The mean of the number of hours played per week
  was 21.9, and the median was 20. There were no
  gender differences.

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Whats it to me?
Games, Life, and The Pursuit of Happiness (title
stolen from Nick Yee)
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Back Again to /Played
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Time Played

• Hours of Play per Week (Nick Yee)
• The mean of the number of hours played per week
  was 21.9, and the median was 20. There were no
  gender differences.

More accurately is 30-40 hours / week. High-end
players can do 70-80 hours a week, routinely. A
raid can take anywhere from 4-12 hours.
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Only 15 of Gamers are Internet Addicts

• "Jeffrey Parsons - a doctoral candidate from
  University of Iowa has recently conducted a
  research on MMORPG addiction.The study found
  that about 15 of gamers meet the criteria for
  Internet addiction as provided by Kimberly Young,
  a leading researcher in Internet addiction. Using
  more strict criteria, a minimum of at least 10
  of gamers met criteria for Internet addiction.
  Compared to national studies of Internet
  addiction, this numbers are somewhat elevated.
  However, given the sheer number of hours MMORPG
  gamers spend online (in comparison to the general
  population), even a 15 addiction rate is
  somewhat low. To illustrate the point, the
  college student spends 10 hours on the Internet
  per week. The average MMORPG gamer (addicted or
  not) spends 20-25 hours per week just playing
  MMORPGs, and an additional 10-15 hours per week
  in other Internet use. In other words, MMORPG
  players are spending 4x as much time online as
  non-gamers.
• (Slashdot, http//games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si
  d05/03/10/1436220fromrss)

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• While playing WoW recently, a friend of mine
  suggested we all type in "/played" to see how
  many hours of game time we had logged. To my
  surprise, I was at 12 days, 8 hours and 17
  minutes. That's 296 hours of time. My friend (a
  stay-at-home dad) then pointed out that he was at
  28 days. That's 672 hours of time. Let's say for
  the sake of argument that a work week is 40 hours
  long. My friend has spent almost 17 work weeks in
  WoW (7 and a half for me) since November.
• There are a few possible reactions to this. Let
  me play out two extremes
• Fantastic. I wish I could play that much! He
  must have a great time, uber gear and a bunch of
  friends.
• or 2) Get a life. This is the end of civilization
  as we know it as virtual communities displace
  real-world ones. This is Robert Putnam's
  hypothesis. Expect a radical decline in the
  quality of existing relationships, more divorces,
  declining work productivity and, say others,
  potential addiction.
• (Posted by Dmitri Williams on February 2, 2005
  http//terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/02/play
  ed.html)

One thing that really opened my eyes to how
much time I was wasting was to use the /played
command in the game. It will tell you exactly how
may hours the character has been played down to
the seconds. I have checked my husband's ... and
it says about 24 days of game time has been spent
on that specific character. That's 24 days of 24
hours each, so in about a three month period he
has spent 576 hours of that time on that one
character. That's not counting his level 20 ...
or his level 15 ... or his level 16 ... or and of
the other various levelled characters he has.
Also it doesn't count all the time he spends on
reading the web pages and message boards about
the game (anonymous, April 12, 2005)
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A Simple Math Problem

• A week has 168 hours in total. Out of that, take
• 40 hours for work
• 5-10 hours for commuting
• 42 hours for sleeping (6 hours / day)
• Average playing time 30 hours a week (10 each
  weekend day, 3 hours each day)
• 122 hours per week.
• Which leaves 46 hrs approx. 6.57 hrs/day for
  EVERYTHING ELSE (activities such as eating,
  washing getting dressing, doing housechores,
  paying bills, getting groceries, going to the
  doctor and other errands, looking after kids/
  pets/parents, other hobbies)
• or 4.57 hrs/day if you are sleeping for 8 hours.
• and thats assuming you work only 40 hours a
  week!
• and that is not counting research
  discussions on the game / guild boards!

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Bridge Command
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(No Transcript)
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In the successful game, people get attached to
their characters, and then to the
game-world. (Jessica Mulligan, executive
producer behind Asherons Call) People dont
just want to be placed in a world and told to
have fun. Some people want a little bit of
direction in terms of what they can do. (John
Smedley)

• MMOGs do indeed function as one novel form of a
  new third place for informal sociability much
  like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts
  of old. MMOGs are ideal for creating bridging
  social capital broad but weak and, while they
  do not deter bonding social capital deep but
  narrow per se, they are also not necessarily
  designed to foster deep and lasting relationship
  on their own either.
• (Constance Steinkuehler, 2005)

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/lol, /cheer, /dance, /rude

• RL MMOG
• /con wife (I need help with my wife faction!)
• Guilds Family
• About 40 of players feel that their online
  friends are comparable or even better than their
  real life friends. about 30 of MMORPG players
  have told personal issues or secrets to online
  friends that they have never told anyone else.
  (Nick Yee, 2003)

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EQW - 5950 members and growing

• He gets home from work, starts playing, and
  generally doesn't get off until bed time. Any day
  off is an all-day gaming fests. He currently is
  getting up around 5am to play for a couple of
  hours before work.
• (March 27, 2004)

For 2 months now my fiance has not stopped
playing EQ for more than 10 minutes unless he is
sleeping or at work! And he only stops playing to
sleep for a couple hours. So he plays at the very
least 8 hours through the week and ALL weekend.
We have 4 kids and are having another in less
than 2 weeks. (April 19, 2004)
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After I lost my job, I'd play 18 hours straight
at times. There was once I even played for over
30 hours without sleep. I'd play EQ, sleep, wake
up, play EQ. I wouldn't eat or drink much. My
room was a disaster. Everything was a
disaster. (July 2, 2004)
I started playing EQ in April of 2001, from that
time up to about a year ago I played more and
more. I joined higher level guilds and worked my
way up to the high end game. We ( my guild )
raided 5 nights a week sometimes for 10 hours ,
and being the good raider I was I even went with
or lead pick-up raids on our nights off. It came
to the point where I worked for 8 hours a day ,
and played for at least the same amount of time
when I got home. The number of days I've spent
playing (days played on all of my characters
combined 300 days ) was all for what?"
(November 27, 2004)
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• "Last November my boyfriend of almost 2 years
  told me that he wanted World of War Craft. Now
  okay...I have no idea what this is. All I know is
  it is a computer game. So I bought it for him for
  Christmas. That has to be the stupidest thing I
  have ever done....He plays it the moment he wakes
  up until the time he goes to work. He goes to
  work (I bring him dinner there sometimes) and
  he's looking up stuff about World of Warcraft. He
  then comes home, grabs dinner, and then sits and
  plays from 11pm to about 330am. Then he gets up
  and repeats the process. Now don't get me wrong
  it isn't that I don't want him to play it. I mean
  I have hobbies too and friends I go out with, but
  it is just that it is taking up about 80 of his
  life."
• (March 19, 2005)

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Reasons for Playing

• At least I am not out on a bar or doing drugs
• We are saving money
• I dont feel comfortable around people
• I will only play for a few minutes
• My friends are online

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They will get sick of the gameright?

• ...He quit playing EQ and went to Dark Ages of
  Camelot.Soon he switched to Star Wars. .Then he
  quit Star Wars and went to AO. After a while with
  that he played Horizons. Now he is playing
  Lineage and waiting for the new EQ to come out.
  That or World of Warcraft.
• (May 27, 2004)

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Whats in Line for the Future?

• Veteran Rewards
• Sony Credit Card
• /pizza
• Sony auctions
• Anarchy Online funded by in-game ads
• Virtual goods exchange (e.g., Sony auction)
• More player involvement (player-driven cities,
  mayors, player council)
• transforming business models (micropayments,
  pay-for-content model
• a look at South Korea and China

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Whats in Line for the Future?

• The forecasted 580 million 2005 China game
  market, has been dominated by one very particular
  type of game, the massively multiplayer online
  game or MMOG.these MMOG products are expected to
  make up over 75 of the China game market in
  2005.
• (From The Service-Oriented Game Industry Paving
  the Way for New Business Models,
• DFC Intelligence, September 2005,
  http//www.dfcint.com/game_article/sep05article.ht
  ml)

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Resources

• Ariadne - Understanding MMORPG Addiction
  (Nicholas Yee)http//www.nickyee.com/hub/addictio
  n/home.html
• Avatars Offline (shortened education version
  Virtual Worlds Inside Online Games)http//www.av
  atarsoffline.com/
• Daedalus Project (Nicholas Yee)http//www.nickyee
  .com/daedalus/
• DFC Intelligence Game Industry
  Researchhttp//www.dfcint.com/
• International Game Developers Association Online
  Games SIG http//www.igda.org/online/
• Massively Multiplayer Online Games The Past, The
  Present, and The Future.http//archive.gamespy.co
  m/amdmmog
• MMOGshttp//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMOG
• MMOG Research by Constance A. Steinkuehlerhttps/
  /mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/mmogresearch
  .html
• MMOGCHART.com (Bruce Woodcock)http//www.mmogchar
  t.com/
• Social Study Gameshttp//socialstudygames.com/
• Terra Novahttp//terranova.blogs.com/

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Select Readings

• Bauman, S. (2004, September 14). Just one fix.
  Computer Games Magazine. Retrieved from
  http//www.cgonline.com/content/view/26/40/
• Becker, D. (2002, April 12). When games stop
  being fun. CNET News. Retrieved from
  http//news.com.com/2100-1040-881673.html
• Hughes, N. (2005, June 9). Multiplayer mayhem.
  Gainesville.com. Retrieved from
  http//www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A
  ID/20050609/ENTERTAINMENT/50609018/1004/entertain
  ment
• Kosak, D. (2003, March 7). Why is Korea the king
  of multiplayer gaming? Gamespy. Retrieved from
  http//archive.gamespy.com/gdc2003/korean/
• McCandless, D. (2003, April 3). Just one more
  go.Guardian. Retrieved from http//www.guardian.c
  o.uk/print/0,3858,4639233-110837,00.html
• Palma, K. (2003, January 12). The New Addiction.
  Eagle Tribune. Retrieved from http//www.eagletrib
  une.com/news/stories/20030112/LI_001.htm
• Strahan, A. (2003, January 24). EverQuest Widows
  Unite. G4. Retrieved from http//www.g4tv.com/call
  forhelp/features/34038/EverQuest_Widows_Unite.html
  
• Schwartz, J. (2000, May 17). Silicon Dreams Real
  life and virtual life intersect as technology
  affects the way we think and live. Washington
  Post, Page G03. Retrieved from http//www.washingt
  onpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagenamearticlenodeconte
  ntIdA12190-2000May16notFoundtrue
• Waters, D. (2005, February 17). Losing yourself
  in online gaming. BBC News (UK Edition)
  Technology. Retrieved from http//news.bbc.co.uk/1
  /hi/technology/4265407.stm