A Slew of Essays on WoW
by Mike D'Anna 
Jun 30th 2006 at 10:00AM
Now this is something that could potentially provide endless debate fodder. While stumbling around the web, I came across this page; a collection of term papers written by undergraduates at San Antonio's Trinity University for the class "Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games".The subjects addressed include "Sexism in WoW", "Real World Transactions of Digital Items from MMOGs", "The Prisoner's Dilemma and Factional Conflict in World of Warcraft", and my personal favorite, the oh-so-socially relevant "Wizards vs. Engineers: The Rumble in the Proverbial Jungle". There are several others covering a wide-range of topics; I haven't had the time to read them all yet, but since I eat this stuff up, I might not get much work done today.
Of course, the real question this begs is: why couldn't assignments have been this cool when I was in school? Do you have any idea how severely the nuns would have beat me if I had asked to write my term paper on a video game?
*sigh*
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian Jun 30th 2006 12:39PM
While I did manage to write a paper on WoW last semester, I found it difficult to explain it to the teacher and classmates who were completely unfamiliar with the type of game. And it was hard to apply it to the subject of the course. Not impossible (I did get an A), but difficult.
I would have jumped at the chance to take an MMO-oriented course, though.
Burgdorn Jun 30th 2006 3:39PM
If my school had me do these kind of projects when I was in classes that had term papers, well I would have gotten all As... or so I like to think...
Aaron Jul 4th 2006 1:12PM
Hi!
If you enjoyed that batch of papers, you should check out the most recent collection of papers from last semester. Though the students used EQ II as their sample environment, many of the papers also speak extensively about WoW.
http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/worlds/students.html
Aaron