Project blog

September 19th, 2006
In June, I presented the first research paper presenting the results of my research at the ACE 2006 (Advances in Computing Entertainment) conference in Hollywood. The title of the paper is "Death Matters: Understanding Gameworld Experience". The paper was awarded with an Outstanding Paper Award, with recommendation for a journal publication and therefore I'm currently working on a expanded version of the paper for the journal Virtual Reality and Broadcasting. The original paper is available on request by survey participants and researchers, but cannot be published on this website due to copyright restrictions.

I will also shortly start to gather more specific information about death in World of Warcraft, as I'm one of the contributors to a forthcoming publication about culture, sociality and gaming in WoW.

I have also given talks about the Death-stories project at Georgia Tech in Atlanta (november 2005), the IT University of Copenhagen (march 2006) and Södertörn University Colleage in Sweden. Slides from this presentations are also available on request!

April 25th, 2006
I have now added a Famous Last Words page to the site, quoting some of the typical, fun, poignant etc Famous Last Words that submitters have provided! When you fill out the survey/submit a story, you can also submit your famous last words.

April 20th, 2006
The survey has been updated so WoW is available as a choice in the survey menus. Noctis has posted about the survey on Warcry WOW so Im getting a lot of submissions from WoW players at the moment - thank you to them! Im also in general getting some really fun and poignant famous last words and I promise to make them available on the website asap!

April 4th, 2006
Noctis at Warcry has been so kind as to post a brief notice on the Warcry network sites about the death stories project (on the City of Heroes, Lineage II, DAoC and SWG and Asheron's Call site). You can see an example here. This has already resulted in several new contributions! To those of you stopping by courtesy of Noctis' post: thank you for taking time to fill in the survey:)

March 17th, 2006
Today I have updated the website to reflect that the project is still alive and kicking!
Today I also gave a talk at the University of Århus, to the students of Information- and Media Studies, about my findings so far, and got some very interesting input which inspired me to get things going here again. It's been my plan to write a project blog since this project started but I havent had time to do much about it. So so far, it will be just be a plain page, without comment function. But feel free to contact me, if you have any questions or comments.

Status of the project is that I now have screenshots of how you die and what then happens, in most of the MMOGs I have been looking at. I have started to take screenshots of all the visual symbols of death, you can find in World of Warcraft, and would love to get some from other worlds as well. Right now, one of the things, I'd like to know is whether the corpses of other players are as a rule visible in other MMOGs than WoW, EverQuest and Anarchy Online (confirmed) and where I can find information about decay times of corpses.

Comments?: klastrupATitu.dk