Las Vegas NowI-Team: Serious Study of Online Games Comes to UNLV

I-Team: Serious Study of Online Games Comes to UNLV

LAS VEGAS -- Maybe it was the Mjolnir Runestone, or perhaps it was the Ancient Pendant of Arathor that claimed Amanda Melilli as an obsessive victim. No matter the trinket, four years into the journey World of Warcraft has become a major part of her life.

The late 20's library technician clutches a warm cup of Jasmine tea, bathed in the crisp greens and blues of her computer monitor. Like a digital Rommel, her level 80 Draenei Shaman surveys the landscape. The Horde continues to break upon the fortress like water on a rock.

Then she spots something.

“Oh! Another one! Gimme!” she chirps, quickly setting the tea down and reaching for her mouse. A vulnerable interloper must be put down.

Melilli is part of the expanding empire of Warcraft. WoW, as it is known among devotees, is a 10-million player strong networked massively multiplayer online game. Subscribers pay $15 a month to get unlimited online action. The game went live five years ago.

Since that day, Michael McCreery has not seen a game, but rather an opportunity. McCreery is a UNLV educational psychology graduate student. He gave up a job as a computer programmer to focus on the convergence of education and technology.

“I picked World of Warcraft because it was an accessible, inexpensive way to look at a virtual environment,” he said.

McCreery’s research focuses on personality traits on both sides of the monitor. He wants to learn the relationship between who players are before, during and after the game. Using WoW teases out other personality quirks and traits. “How do these participants behave in relationship to what we know about their personality?” McCreery said.

Traditional psychology studies say personalities are fixed and stable. The belief is that out-of-game personalities will translate into the game. “If you're extroverted, you tend to be extroverted throughout your life,” he said.

Forty participants combined to give McCreery 160 hours of video, notes and research to comb through.

The names and data must remain secret until the publish date at some point in the spring.

McCreery said Melilli would have been a great case study. Melilli says with a full smile, “I’m very OCD,” knowing the minor ravages of requiring everything to be just so. It manifested itself in the form of a growing accumulation of stuff. “I would collect things -- movies, comic books, books, dishes, I don't know, anything that was collectible I could collect,” she said.

Now the obsessive need to collect, sort and count is focused on the computer, a much cheaper alternative. “I pay $15 a month and I can get all my OCD organization needs out of the way in a virtual world,” Melilli said. She drew her own personality into the game, turning the character into a reflection of herself.

McCreery says businesses have started to recognize WoW and other games as divining rods for productivity and leadership. Watching employees play gives employers chances to identify latent social skills in workers. “Whether or not you can enhance them, put them in situations that allow them to take charge -- maybe to hire them because they have leadership potential,” he said. Harvard has studied the phenomenon before.

As Melilli’s Draenei continues to pound away on Horde Orcs, the Jasmine tea has cooled. The seductive grind of battle keeps her engaged and happy. Academic research or not, there is always another piece of armor to collect. “I like to just go up and whack at things and hit my little heroism button.”

Email your comments or questions to Jonathan Humbert at jhumbert@klastv.com.