World of Warcraft, Democracy and Society

Hello and welcome to my blog WoWdemocracy. 

 

My name is Sebastian but in World of Warcraft I usually go under the nickname Zeotrix, a nickname that I have been using throughout all of my gaming years. In World of Warcraft my main interest have been PvP and arenas and I consider myself a pretty decent pvp-warlock with at least some teams over 2000 rating during season 8, which was the season I started playing arenas.

 

 

However, this blog will not be about PvP, raiding or my World of Warcraft-achievements (which I must admit are quite modest). No rather this blog will be based on the research about World of Warcraft that is now currently being conducted throughout the academic world. 

 

MMORPG:s have been a relatively unresearched subject during the years computer games have existed. Some anthropological works here and there have been published about how children are letting their entire life being dedicated to these kinds of games or by psychologists trying to find a link between violent behavior and computer games. But most of us who play, know that the online gaming community does not consists of a bunch of addicted violent persons but instead it is a prosperous and thriving community that builds up the majority of the online gaming community.

 

Therefore I have decided to take on a somewhat different approach with my research. As of now I am studying for my masters-degree in Political Science in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I will write my master-thesis the spring of 2011 and hopefully get into a PhD program the next fall. By being a member of the enormous community of World of Warcraft I have, during the last couple of years, seen that very little political research, almost none, have been conducted about World of Warcraft and MMORPG:s at large and I started to see that something was missing from the academia. I mean a game that lures over 12 million active players to participate in groups, start guilds, organizations, meet up in real life, fight in teams way bigger than a normal football teams and actually get all of those 25-40 people to do the exact same thing at the exact same time (a truly tremendous achievement) must have other implications and effects than getting a few people addicted and violent? The amount of team-work it takes to kill a boss like the Lich King (heroic) is nothing but heroic and would surely get any hockey-coach to blush with envy.

 

That is why, during this winter and spring, I will conduct a full-scale websurvey about World of Warcraft and what players experience in the game in terms of democracy and team-work. But in order for the research to actually show any results I need your answers and opinions! The survey will ship at the beginning of December and the launch of Cataclysm and will be a two-wave survey with a second survey coming out in the beginning of April. So, in short, get all your friends to participate in this pioneer study of World of Warcraft with a new academic perspective with the democratic implications as the main subject of the thesis!

 

During my master-thesis I will continuously update this blog with my findings about World of Warcraft and what other researchers have been writing about the subject. I hope you all will like it and of course I will gladly accept any kinds of comments or critiques about the thing I am posting.

 

/Best Regards Sebastian “Zeotrix” Lundmark

 

If you want to know more about me or my work please visit wowdemocracy.wordpress.com

 

If you want to check out my main character, it’s called Zeotrix and I play at Kazzak – Europe.