Participants in the conference may send paragraphs, fragments, or entire working papers to William Bainbridge at either wbainbri@nsf.gov or wsbainbridage@gmail.com, to be posted in this section.

Bainbridge, William Sims

• Virtual Nations
• Direct Contact with Extraterrestrials

Chesney, Thomas, Swee-Hoon Chuah & Robert Hoffmann

• Virtual World Experimentation: An Exploratory Study

Jenkins, Peter S.

• The Convergence of the Real and Virtual Worlds
• PowerPoint from "Breaking the Magic Circle" conference at the University of Tampere in April

Sinclair, Gerri, Tarek El-Eryan, Matthew Jenkins & Joanna Robinson.

• World of HealthCraft - The Quest for Healthcare Leadership

  World of HealthCraft aims to deliver leadership and collaboration training using a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The goal of the project is to explore methods of adapting online entertainment platforms to serve educational objectives in an environment that works for key individuals in organizations.  To achieve this goal, the project team is designing and developing a pilot training module to act as a bridge between game play and a proprietary leadership framework provided by the client. The final product for this phase will be the prototype for a new kind of learning that harnesses the power of participatory pedagogy to deliver high level leadership training with impact.

Williams, D., M. Consalvo, S. Caplan & N. Yee

• Looking for gender (LFG): Gender roles and behaviors among online gamers. (working paper under review). 

The Virtual World Exploratorium ProjectThis NSF-sponsored project features a combination of several types of empirical data from the MMO EverQuest II: 3 TB of server-side data, an original survey on a sample of 7,000 players conducted with the game operator, networking chat data, and cross sectional data, plus ethnographic interviews and participant observation work. The people working on the project are the PIs: Dmitri Williams, USC; Noshir Contractor, Northwestern; M. Scott Poole, UIUC; Jaideep Srivastrava, Minnesota; and a large cast of Ph.D. students from all four universities, plus Ted Castronova, Nick Yee and others. The papers and topics we're currently working on are:

• Problematic uses of MMOs and a comparison of non-players
• Role playing
• Trust and social capital
• Network co-evolution
• Leadership
• Flow
• Economic indicators