Socializing in Higher Education through an MMORPG

Abstract

Our society is a complex network of people that requires cooperation and socialization to thrive, being that interaction and communication between individuals have been key parts of our society since the beginning of its existence. With the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic and the need to quarantine, this complex need has been truly affected on many sectors, and we became less connected. Technology was an important factor during the early days of the pandemic, with people starting to opt for certain systems and platforms that allowed them to stay in touch with each other, however nowadays, there are still massive limitations to these platforms when it comes to an interaction’s ambiance due to the lack of user immersion. In this paper, we present an MMORPG with a scalable infrastructure able to host events for hundreds of people, but most importantly that allows users to communicate in a more realistic manner with a set of functionalities that fulfil the goal to combat the undesirable isolation. To verify the effectiveness of our platform, questionnaires, and usability tests were conducted.