Shocking study: MMO players are social

"It's sort of social. Demented and sad, but social." -- The Breakfast Club.

Online social skills don't really buy you much cred in the real world guys. I'm just sayin', not hatin'. Besides there's just as much anti-social behavior being learned in these games as there is social behavior, if not more so.

... What? Are you serious? They actually did experiments and stuff?

"As we can see here in experiment video number one: There seems to be a multitude of chatter going on in areas heavily populated by players. So, therefore, we've come to the conclusion that mmo gamers are chatty."

Scientist A: Brilliant!

Scientist B: Noble Piece Prize Material!

Scientist C: I should have joined the peace corp...

Maybe they can study how it is they get funding to do so much stupid studies.

People who suck at being social in the real world depend on MMORPGs. After thousands of hours clicking and clicking, attention from other people is the compensation they get.

No one has hung out with one of my friends in over two weeks because every time anyone calls him to hang out, he's busy doing a raid or something in WoW, and says he has too much to do and can't hang out that day. So tell me again how MMOs are social?

That's Champaign-Urbana, not Urbana-Champaign.

...

Not that I go there or anything...

>_>

I got the impression the researchers were implying online social skills are an equilvalent to real-life social skills. Right...anyone with common sense knows they are two totally different animals.

it's Urbana-Champaign

I call it socially unsociable.

Ha ha, give them a break. This study was probably something a student put together in order to complete his graduate degree or something. Thousands upon thousands of these research projects like these are done all the time. There are probably fifty other studies that discuss the same material. And probably have the same conclusions as well.

Well holy crap... I don't know the correct name of our other campus...

I'm going to go to sleep now. I don't think my brain is quite up to par right now.

Really i found this interesting.

These statements:

"The researchers said that games like Asheron's Call and Lineage act like coffee shops or pubs by "providing places for social interaction"

online games are always been medium for social interaction and making friends online.

i Have made many friends at teenzone

Online games are interesting but hopefully gamers should not prefer violence in online games.

This is actually a helpful study. Most Americans -- most people on the planet in fact -- don't understand that virtual worlds are intrinsically social environments.

This research documents something that is accepted as common sense by most gamers. But, because it appears in a peer-reviewed academic journal, other scholars can now cite it in their own work. In the world of scholarship, it is thus converted from a "widely held opinion" into a "research finding."

If you take a close look at the study, you'll find that it is much more nuanced than the OP suggests. The authors go to great lengths to establish connections between their research and existing sociological work on the nature of American community.

There have been many studies on this topic, but few have been characterized by the same degree of methodological rigor.

The authors are well-known scholars, and one of them has testified on the floor of Congress. In a world full of people like Jack Thompson and Joe Lieberman, gamers need all the help they can get. So, why not give the researchers some credit instead of sniping at them?

Aaron

That's exactly why I don't like them. I'm a very anti-social person and prefer to play solo games.