Reading Report #3

Reading Report #3

According to Nick Yee in the chapter 9 “The psychology of massively multi-user online role-playing games” in the book “Avatars at Work and Play” in 2007, page 187 to 207, millions of players “interact, collaborate, and form relationships with each other” (Yee, 2006, p187) through acting in online virtual environments such as “Massively Multi-User Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)” (Yee, 2006, p187) every day (Yee, 2006, p187). Users must purchase or download the specific MMORPG software and pay a monthly playing time fee which is “around 10 to 15 USD” (Yee, 2006, p189) to access the servers (Yee, 2006, p189-190). The average time that users spend in their MMORPS is “22.72 hours each week” (Yee, 2006, p193). In the MMORPGs, users always need to make groups of “4 to 8 players” (Yee, 2006, p194) for hunting or to fighting in virtual gaming world (Yee, 2006, p194). For some world events in the virtual world, there might need hundreds of players interacting (Yee, 2006, p194). Moreover, players collaborate with each other also by trade; for example, some virtual business men sell virtual goods to earn virtual gold in the game (Yee, 2006, p194-196). On the other hand, the motivations of most players are that users can feel powerful, wealthy, and successful in the MMORPG which they have chosen and they might have never felt those feelings in real life (Yee, 2006, p196). According to the statistics in the study, almost “45% people felt that their MMORPG friends were better than their real friends” (Yee, 2006, p196-197). Final, problematic usage of MMORPGs is some players spend too much time in the virtual gaming world (Yee, 2006, p198).