From “The Only MMO is WoW” dept.:

There’s probably worthwhile studies to be done on the MMORPG phenomenon. The games of the genre are designed to keep you interested and engaged for thousands of hours. The game itself is a potential setting for the formation of a long-lasting community that could extend far beyond the game realm. MMOs have provoked real life violence. Prisoners are rumored to have to play them to support repressive regimes by bilking money from Westerners.
More than near any other sort of video game, MMOs have gravitas in the real world and a transformative effect on their players.
“What Gamers Want: Researchers Develop Tool To Predict Player Behavior” advertises itself as a study of how gamers play MMOs. With such a study, the authors claim, “we are able to predict what a player in a game will do based on his or her previous behavior, with up to 80 percent accuracy”.
Intriguing. What kind of person crafts, or plays the market, or focuses on PvP? Are some people likelier to become community leaders? Who likes the follower role — are these people the healers? There’s hundreds of questions that could be asked.
This study, however, doesn’t focus on the players at all, really. It focuses solely on achievement. Not in a general sense, either: it’s a study on how people earn achievement rewards in World of Warcraft.
From the press release: “Specifically, the researchers collected data on 14,000 players and the order in which they earned their achievement badges. The researchers then identified the degree to which each individual achievement was correlated to every other achievement.”
So, this study didn’t focus on actual player achievements, like leadership, community building, teamwork, life/game balance, or anything. It correlated the Blizzard-defined achievement rewards, conditions that Blizzard chose because it was something they could track and would help keep players in the game by giving them specific goals.
This paper doesn’t study MMO players. It studies Blizzard’s efforts to guide WoW players.
Compared to 2008’s study of EverQuest II players, where they used extensive logs that recorded every action players took in the game, this WoW achievement-focused study looks weak.