Selected Bibliography of Resources for the Study of the World of Warcraft

Selected Bibliography of Resources for the Study of the World of Warcraft

John E. Adkins, M.A., M.S.L.S.

University of Charleston, Charleston, West Virginia

Jeff Green, M.A.

Doctoral Candidate, Marshall University

South Charleston, West Virginia

Scope Note

This bibliography contains selected items related to the Massively Multiplayer online (MMO) game World of Warcraft.  Items include two main areas of interest: first, scholarly studies and discussions of the game and its players and second, discussions on the use of MMOs and other gaming platforms in education.  John's interest in this topic on a scholarly level began when he read Jane McGonigal’s recent book, Reality is Broken where she discusses her ideas about gamification as a way to enhance education in life in general.  Also, as a lifelong gamer, though not a World of Warcraft player until recently, he has always felt that games held the potential to be far more than mere recreational activities. Jeff is also a lifelong gamer with an interest in how gaming relates to education.

World of Warcraft is an online video game that allows players to share in an immersive alternate reality world based very loosely on western fantasy/mythology tropes.  In World of Warcraft the player is represented by a on screen character known as an avatar through which they are able to interact with the virtual world.  Players can represent themselves as elves, dwarves, humans, or other beings and are able to tailor their avatar’s appearance, dress, and sex.  As the classic New Yorker cartoon states, “On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.”  This ability to create an identity separate from one’s  true identity is the subject of numerous studies by scholars.  Other scholars have used World of Warcraft and other MMOs to model disease transmission or to study language or other aspects of human (or in some cases non-human) behavior.

This bibliography should be considered a working bibliography and is not intended to be exhaustive.  Annotations will be added to items as time allows.  The compilers are a librarian and gamer with graduate degrees in library science and historical studies and an economic researcher and doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership.

Books

Adams, Tyrone L. and Stephen A. Smith. Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.

Atkins, Barry, and Tanya Krzywinska, eds.  Videogame/Player/Text.  Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012?.

Bainbridge, William Sims.  The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Chen, Mark. Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

Corneliussen, Hilde G. and Jill Walker Rettberg, eds.  Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.  

Cuddy, Luke and John Nordlinger, eds.  World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King.  Chicago: Open Court, 2009.

Gee, James Paul.  What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.  New York: Palgrave Macmilan, 2007.

Harrigan, Pat and Noah Wardip-Fruin, eds.  Second Person: Role Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Mayra, Frans, ed.  Computer Games and Digital Cultures: Conference Proceedings.  Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2002.

Nardi, Bonnie A.  My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft.  Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Reeves, Byron and Read, J. Leighton.  Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete.  Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009.

Qvortrup, L., ed.  Virtual Interaction: Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds.  London: Springer-Verlag, 2000.

Taylor, T. L.  Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Pat Harrigan, eds.  Third Person.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012?.

Articles

Bessiere, Katherine,  A. Fleming Seay and Sara Kiesler.  “The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft.”  CyberPsychology & Behavior 10, no. 4 (2007): 530-5.

Brown, John Seely and Douglas Thomas.  “The Gamer Disposition.”  Harvard Business Review (2008).

Castranova, Edward.  “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.”  The Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology 2, no. 1 (2001).  Available at< http://www.bepress.com/giwp/default/vol2/iss1/art1/>.

Chen, Chien-Hsun, Chuen-Tsai Sun and Jilung Hsieh.  “Player Guild Dynamics and Evolution in Massively Multiplayer Online Games.”  CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 3 (2008): 293-301.

Curry, Kristal.  “Warcraft and Civic Education: MMORPGs as Participatory Cultures and How Teachers Can Use Them to Improve Civic Education.” The Social Studies 101 (2010): 250-253.

Ducheneaut, Nicolas, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Rober J. Moore.  “Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft.”  Games and Culture 1, No. 4 (2006): 281-317.

Golub, Alex.  “Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game.”  Anthropological Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2010): 17-45.

Griffiths, Mark.  “Online Video Gaming: What Should Educational Psychologists Know?”  Educational Psychology in Practice 26, no. 1 (2010): 35-40.  

Grimes, Sara M. and Andrew Feenberg.  “Rationalizing Play: A Critical Theory of Digital Gaming.”  The Information Society 25 (2009): 105-118.

Krzywinska, Tanya.  “Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories: World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft.”  Games and Culture 1, no. 4 (2006): 383-396.

Moore, Robert J.  “Building an MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft.”  Games and Culture 1, No. 4 (2006): 281-317.

Mortensen, Torill Elvira.  “‘WoW is the New MUD’: Social Gaming from Text to Video.”  Games and Culture 1, No. 4 (2006): 397-413.

Nakamura, Lisa.  “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.”  Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2 (2009): 128-44.

Oliver, Martin and Diane Carr.  “Learning in Virtual Worlds: Using Communities of Practice to Explain How People Learn from Play.”  British Journal of Educational Technology 40, no. 3 (2009): 444-457.

Pawlikowski, Mirko and Matthias Brand.  “Excessive Internet Gaming and Decision Making: Do Excessive World of Warcraft Players have Problems in Decision Making Under Risky Conditions?”  Psychiatry Research 188 (2011): 428-433.

Peters, Christopher S., and L. Alvin Malesky, Jr.  “Problematic Usage Among Highly-Engaged Players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.”  CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 4 (2008): 481-4.

Taylor, T.L.  “Does WoW Change Everything?  How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base ans Surveillance Mod Scene Cause Me Pause.”  Games and Culture 1, no. 4 (2006): 318-337.

___.  “Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming.”  Convergence 9, no. 1 (2003): 21-46.

Yee, Nick.  “The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play.”  Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (2006): 68-71.

Theses and Dissertations

Klastrup, Lisbeth.  “Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds - Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story.”  PhD diss., IT University of Copehagen, 2003.

Mortensen, Torill Elvira.  “Pleasures of the Player: Flow and Control in Online Games.”  PhD diss., University of Bergen and Volda University College, 2003.

Sicart, Miguel.  “Computer Games, Players, Ethics.”  PhD diss., University of Copenhagen, 2006.

Tran, Chris.  “What’s Real Anymore: A Comparison of World of Warcraft, Secondlife and Online Experiences.”  MS thesis, University of North Texas, 2009.

Videos

Websites