MMORPs and Civil Society....

I stumbled across this very interesting blog. This post is about an online protest that occured in one of the largest MMORPs in China. It had to do with a player whose avatar was deemed offensive and jailed until her agreed to change it. This resulted in a massive (+60,000 players?) protest of this that was also somehow related to deteriorating Chinese-Japanese relations...This is the kind of 'civic efficacy' that social studies is supposed to foster...

On a different note, this article in the online journal Game Studies describes a MMORP that had as its goal the manipulation of eToys stock price (within the game itself) and how players sought to accomplish this...Sounds like economic education to me...

MMORPG in High Schools

Here's a piece by a guy from Trinity Unversity that explores the use of virtual worlds in teaching high school. A musts read with some important citations that we need to get. I'll try to find these and post soon...

MMORG and Teaching/Learning

Found a guy named John Savery (U. of Akron) through a colleague here...He's done work in the educational potential of MMORG's for classroom practice. I sent him an e-mail, no response yet...

Along similar lines, ran across this grant proposal which lays out how you might actually use MMORG in a K-12 classroom as well as some key citations we might want to check out.

We need to check out Civ3 to see if this might have more potential for the social studies classroom...

A few other pieces:

• MMORPG’s in the college classroom
• NECC presentation outline: Video Games as Constructivist Learning Environments (http://topics.typepad.com/pondering/games/index.html)
• Rochester Castle MMORPG: Instructional gaming and collaborative learning at a Western Australian school: includes a "where to start" section...
• A Second Life 'action research' study blog: http://www.secondlife.intellagirl.com/2006/06/26/working-toward-an-outilne/

Second Life Economics

Found several interesting pieces at CNETnews.com. This one is about 2nd life's virtual economoy and this one is about the market for real estate in 2nd life...

Key points raised in each: (1) copright, propoerty rights, (2) lack of 'government' enforcement of propoerty rights, (3) degree to which users (the 'people') will demand some redress of these perceived injustices...

Give these a read and let's touch base...

MMORG and Teaching Social Studies

Resources

Edward Castronova-RMT Overview

Edward Castronova-The Economist

Game Studies-On Virtual Economies

Games and Culture (Academic Journal)

mmorgchart.com (Size of MMORG world)

Academic Papers

SSRN-On the Research Value of Large Games Natural Experiments in Norrath and Camelot by Edward Castronova

SSRN-Real Products in Imaginary Worlds by Edward Castronova

SSRN-On Virtual Economies by Edward Castronova

SSRN-Virtual Property by Joshua Fairfield

SSRN-Virtual Worlds A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier by Edward Castronova

State of Play III Video Time Capsule (Videos from first 3 SOP conferences, including an interview with Nick DeKanter!)

Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University

Terra Nova (The Blog...)

G4 - Videos - Search