Every day, millions of people log on to online environments known as Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). They spend on average 20 hours a week interacting with each other through real-time 3D graphical avatars in a large persistent world. Some of them are starting a pharmaceutical business. Some are staging a social protest. Others are committing genocide.

The label of "video game" is distracting because the media has trained us to equate video games with violence, addiction and mindless play. In this presentation, I will draw out 3 themes in MMORPGs - the blurring of work and play, the restructuring of offline relationships, and forms of social protests - to illustrate just how nuanced and complex "play" has become in contemporary video games.

Nick Yee is currently a PhD student in the Department of Communication. He has collected online survey data from 35,000 MMORPG players over the past 5 years. He is also involved in research in immersive virtual reality with Jeremy Bailenson.

Findings from his online surveys are presented at: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/