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"Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games

Observations show that the prevalence and extent of social activities in MMOGs might have been previously over-estimated, and that gaming communities face important challenges affecting their cohesion and eventual longevity.
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The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in world of warcraft

This paper examines some of the factors that could explain the success or failure of a game guild based on more than a year of data collected from five World of Warcraft servers, focusing on structural properties of these groups, as represented by their social networks and other variables.
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Taming Google-Scale Continuous Testing

A project that aims to reduce lag time between code check-ins and test result feedback to developers by controlling test workload without compromising quality, and distilling test results data to inform developers, while they write code, of the impact of their latest changes on quality.
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Virtual “Third Places”: A Case Study of Sociability in Massively Multiplayer Games

Georg Simmel [American Journal of Sociology 55:254–261 (1949)] is widely credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability – “the sheer pleasure of the company of others” and the…
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Doing Virtually Nothing: Awareness and Accountability in Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds

The impact of the lack of each type of information onPlayers’ ability to tightly coordinate their activities is discussed and guidelines for improving coordination and, ultimately, the players’ social experience are offered.
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Social TV: Designing for Distributed, Sociable Television Viewing

The initial results from a series of studies illustrating how people interact in front of a television set are described, and guidelines as well as specific features are proposed to inform the design of future “social television” prototypes.
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From Tree House to Barracks

A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping…
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Building an MMO With Mass Appeal

How WoW functions as a game is explored with automated “bots” to illustrate how WoW refined a formula inherited from preceding MMOs, and raises questions about WoW’s future growth and more generally about the ability of MMOs to evolve beyond their familiar template.
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Coordinating joint activity in avatar-mediated interaction

This study analyzes screen-capture video of user-to-user interaction in the game, City of Heroes, under two conditions: one with the game's standard awareness cues and the other with enhanced cues to demonstrate interactional slippages caused by the absence of awareness cues.
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Extreme Makeover: Bending the Rules to Reduce Risk Rewriting Complex Systems

The experience of using XP to reimplement sophisticated, high-performance imaging software in a research environment suggests that some of the classic 12 practices which define XP should be adjusted when there is a existing, well-structured system to serve as a guide.
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