Experiences from implementing an educational MMORPG

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation of an educational Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), named World of Wisdom (WoW). WoW is designed under the context of game design theory and game features extracted from surveys of popular MMORPGs. It is an open educational platform where students can “play exercises” instead doing them in the traditional paper way. Further, it provides an editor for teachers to create new game plots and content without the need of programming. As an aid for lectures, WoW can motivate the students to do the exercises more thoroughly. Finally, the paper presents both positive and negative experiences from the design and implementation of the game. We find that there are various theories that can benefit the design of educational MMORPGs. However, the key problem is how to choose and apply relevant theory to support the design, our experiences in the paper are examples that explore and explain this problem.