Gold Farmers: Deviancy is just a name (Part I)
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad on Oct 5, 2011Gold Farming has gathered a lot of media attention lately because of a recent prison scandal in China involving . For the benefit of the readers who may not be familiar with gold farming, here is a brief description of this phenomenon: Gold Farming...
Social Capital in MMOs?
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad on Jun 22, 2011In the last post I discussed the pitfalls inherent in thinking about virtual worlds and the "real" world in a dichotomous manner. An interesting issue that the mapping question raises is the question of efficacy of models from one domain in the...
Revisiting Virtual Worlds Reseach
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad on May 19, 2011I recently came across an article by Villi Lehdonvirta on the dichotomous thinking regarding Virtual Worlds i.e., a lot of virtual worlds research assumes that online virtual worlds and the offline "real world" are somehow fundamentally different....