cultural difference on intercultural persistent state worlds
Alan Meades, a Masters-degree (Electronic Arts) student at Middlesex University (UK) does post-graduate research in cyberanthropology: “This study aims to verify if players originating from geographically and culturally different backgrounds exhibit different game preferences, and therefore behaviour within Massively Multiplayer Online games. This study focuses specifically on Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XI because of the design of the server infrastructure, and the resultant feature that each server is shared with people from many cultures and nations. […]“ On his website Alan hosts an according online-survey, both in English and Japanese language! When I hit the page today it already reported: 1409 completed surveys since February 27th 2005. After this, to be honest, I felt somewhat relieved by what his subpages On Hofstede, On Bartle, and especially On Anthropology all have to say: “Coming Soon!” … Seems that we are brothers-in-arms, my man ;-)