Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

WoW is the New MUD

2006; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1555412006292622

1555-4139

Torill Elvira Mortensen,

Educational Games and Gamification

With the immense popularity of massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), other media as well as game research have discovered gaming as a topic of discussion and study. These discussions, however, tend to ignore the history of both games and of game studies. This article addresses the connections between one of the old and, today, obscure forms of using computers for multiplayer gaming—the text-based Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)—and the current, highly visible and massively used graphic interface game World of Warcraft. These connections range from player style through game-play options to social interaction and player-controlled social modifiers within both types of games. The comparison is based on play, observation, and interviews with players in MUDs and in WoW.