This screenshot from May 2008 shows a Blood Elf dancing with a Night Elf to celebrate the successful conclusion of a scientific conference held in World of Warcraft: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual Both were my own avatars, "multiboxing" with two computers.

Back to WoW! A revisit ethnographic study of World of Warcraft Starting in January 2007, I have repeatedly entered this marvelous virtual world to carry out observational and even statistical research. One major result was the 2010 book, The Warcraft Civilization, published by MIT Press: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/warcraft-civilization Another was the first major scientific conference held in a gameworld, as shown in the picture to the left. Very recent virtual world studies are in the WRSP online encyclopedia: https://wrldrels.org/2019/09/18/world-of-warcraft/

https://wrldrels.org/2019/10/04/everquest/ WSB blog: https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/bio/bainbridge WSB information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sims_Bainbridge Curriculum Vitae - Online Datasets - Recent Online Publications