National Science Foundation to fund World of Warcraft study

Posted Sep 14th 2008 11:00AM by John Callaham
Filed under: Culture, MMO, World of Warcraft

It's your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. According to a story on the Ocean County Register's web site the University of California at Irvine has received a whopping $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a study centered around Blizzard's hit MMO game World of Warcraft.

Specifically the study is supposed to look into why Chinese players of the game tend to play it as is while American players tend to try to use mods to play the game. UCI informatics professor Bonnie Nardi, who will head up the study, says, "We are examining the many reasons for this disparity, including cultural and institutional factors," We will leave it to our readers to debate whether a government agency should be spending our money in this matter.

[Via Massively]

Gallery: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Tags: blizzard, blizzard-entertainment, world-of-warcraft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Sure, why not? It could end up being a pretty interesting sociological study. It might reach no particularly deep conclusion, but that's the risk you take when funding scientific research.Posted at 2:40PM on Sep 14th 2008 by Adam

Why would anyone come up with a study like that? You should just go to a forum about WoW and ask that question. Heck even I could give you that answer if you gave me the 100k. Posted at 1:13AM on Sep 15th 2008 by Sonic