Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Report on Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming

Noted on Stephen Downes always informative newsletter OLDaily.

From the ADL site: The The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative released a report in March, examining multiplayer online games as a future focus area for ADL. The report, "Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming: A Research Framework for Military Training and Education." reviews relative online gaming research literature and proposes 15 primary experiments pertaining to massive multiplayer online gaming (MMOG), first popularized in the entertainment world and now finding growing interest in education and training environments.

The report is available for downloading here.

Stephen's comment: "this report is a good and in-depth study of the relation between online role-playing games such as MUDs and educational achievement. There is some discussion of how players of such games self-organize and some lighter discussion of the psychological impact of play in such environments."

And while some of us may not be entirely comfortable with the military connection, it's good to remember that the Internet itself began life as ARPANET, a military research project.

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