for science
Lawful Neutral: Defining toxicity in the MMO industry
One of my earliest memories from World of Warcraft isn't really a positive one. It was in back in the Wrath days. My guild...
Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster shares the secret of good social design in MMOs
Raph Koster, the game designer behind Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Playable Worlds' upcoming project, has posted yet another essay about MMORPG design,...
No, Twitch’s move to investigate off-platform toxicity is not ‘novel’ for the industry
Twitch is changing its hateful conduct and harassment policy once again, this time to allow moderators to take into account problematic activity that occurs...
New UK research finds opening lootboxes is ‘structurally and psychologically akin’ to gambling
The mountain of research-based evidence against lootboxes has had another leaflet added to the pile. A recent report from researchers at the universities of...
Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster on the player-driven economies at the heart of virtual worlds
Playable Worlds' Raph Koster is back with another blog post that serves as a tip-off for what kind of MMORPG he and his team...
Massively Overthinking: Retaking Quantic’s survey to determine our ‘gamer type’
Five years ago - yes, it's been that long! - we did an Overthinking in which our staff all took Quantic's survey to see...
World of Warcraft gamers move 21B gold through the player economy every day
IT-centric Splunk's .conf is not generally an event we cover here on MOP, but the .conf20 edition held back in October had a presentation of...
A look back at the MMO and gaming science topics of 2020
It's now become a long-running tradition on Massively OP to track science-related and science-adjacent stories that touch on the MMORPG world, but this past...
Cooperating in violent games like Fortnite is good for children, actually
Here's something that might bake your noodle: A new study suggests that children playing violent video games cooperatively such as Fortnite are actually more...
Ten-year study finds no link between game violence and aggressive behavior from adolescence to adulthood
We've got another leaflet of evidence on the already towering pile of research suggesting no link between video game violence and aggressive behavior. A...
UK study says over 1 in 10 young gamers go into debt due to lootbox spending habits
The pushback against lockboxes in gaming in the UK continues in spite of the matter not exactly making non-stop headlines. A new study from...
ToxMod is a new moderation tool that recognizes and reports voice chat hate speech in real-time
Moderating a game's text chat isn't easy by any means, but at least there are a variety of tools and algorithms that try to...
For Science: Researchers investigate why some players invert their directional controls
When you have an analog stick to control the camera, does pushing the stick forward tilt the camera up or down? The Guardian published...
New survey points to increase in hate and harassment in online multiplayer games
The behavior of people in online games does not appear to be improving for the better. According to national survey results from the Anti-Defamation...
For Science: Gaming is good for you, actually, suggests new Oxford study
A new University of Oxford study published this week suggests that there's a "positive relation between game play and well-being."
The paper itself hasn't been...
EVE Online dev discusses how communities and lasting friendships form in the sandbox
Let's all ignore the 15 weeks' worth of explosions, bubbles, and fighting going on in EVE Online and instead talk about friendship. Or more...
Researchers argue Pokemon Go caused a discernable increase in car accidents, injuries, and deaths
What is the deadliest video game in existence? If a scientific whitepaper is to be believed, at least in the case of Tippecanoe County,...
Star Citizen has 720K total backers and 34K subscribers according to gathered public data
Getting subscriber details for multiplayer and MMO titles out of companies can often be like pulling teeth out of an alligator's mouth with a...
EVE Online players submitted over 41M classifications to fight COVID for CCP’s latest Project Discovery initiative
What's better than a science MMO story or a feel-good MMO story? One that's both. And this one is both, as EVE Online and...
For science: New UK study finds that video games improve the mental health, reading, and writing skills of kids
So this one's fun. The results of a study performed in the UK between November and December of 2019 have just been released. The...
