Academic refs
These are academic references which discuss areas related to the Second Life world, but not specifically the Second Life world itself, such as video game culture, virtual reality environments, and the like.
Contents
MUDs
Neverwinter Nights
- The Non-sense of Gender in Neverwinter Nights, Hilde Corneliussen and Torill Elvira Mortensen (2005), in Women in Games (2005) Conference papers, Dundee, Scotland 8-10 August 2005.
Video Game Literature
- Robertson, J. and Good, J. (2005).Story creation in virtual game worlds. Communications of the ACM, 48: 61-65.
- Marc Prensky - Digital Game Based Learning, McGraw Hill, 2001
- Marc Prensky - Don't bother me Mom - I'm learning, Paragon House, 2006 (an easy read)
- Mark Wolf (ed) - The Medium of the Video Game, University of Texas Press, 2001
- Mark Wolf & Bernard Perron (eds) - The Video Game Theory reader, Routledge 2003
- James Gee - What Video Games have to teach us about Learning and Literacy, Palgrave Macmillan 2003
Virtual Reality Design
- Robertson, J. and Howells, C. (In press, 2008)) Computer Game Design: Opportunities for Successful Learning To appear in Computers & Education.
- Robertson, J. and Nicolson, K. (2007) Adventure Author: a learning environment to support creative design. In Bekker, Robertson and Skov (Eds). Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children 2007, Aalborg, Denmark
- Boyd Davis, Stephen, Huxon, Avom, Lansdown, John - The Design of Virtual Environments with particular reference to VRML (Middx University 1996)
http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/virtual/vrmldes/title.htm
Old but the paper is still really worth a read. Avon was my old housemate - he wrote this when we shared a flat and probably was one of the main reasons I got into VR.
World of Warcraft
- Jill Walker Rettberg, "A Network of Quests in World of Warcraft". In Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, eds. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2007.
- Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, co-edited by Jill Walker Rettberg and Hilde G. Corneliussen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008
- WoW is the new MUD, Social Gaming from Text to Video, Torill Elvira Mortensen (2006), in Douglas Thomas (ed): Games and Culture, a Journal of Interactive Media, Volume 1, Number 4, Sage Publications October 2006.
None of the above references relate directly to the Second Life world, they are general references for games based Learning, I would recommend Castronova's book Synthetic environments as at least a good starting point all be it from an economists perspective. (Paul Hollins 12 Dec 2006)
