Online Multiplayer Games

William Sims Bainbridge is the author of 18 books and about 200 articles in the areas of sociology of technology, social movements, and research methodologies. For his recent book, God from the Machine, he programmed a neural network multi-agent system to simulate religious cognition and conversion in a large community. His book about World of Warcraft, The Warcraft Civilization, has recently been published by MIT Press. After organizing the first large scientific meeting inside World of Warcraft in May 2008, he edited a book growing out of the proceedings, Online Worlds, published by Springer. He spends well over a thousand hours each year doing observational research inside virtual worlds, and he is currently writing a pair of books on how gameworlds explore both the future and the past of humanity. For the last seventeen years, he has served as a program officer managing review of grant proposals in the social science and computer science directorates of the National Science Foundation. He has extensive experience editing publications on the societal implications of nanotechnology, converging technologies, and human-computer interaction.

• Introduction.- Historical-Cultural Origins.- Technical Constraints.- Rolecoding and Social Control.- Personality and Motivation.- Avatars and Characters.- Virtual Professions and Economies.- Social Relations Inside Games.- Implications for External Society.