The last 10 years have seen explosive growth in the fields of online gaming. The largest of these games are undoubtedly the Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), such as World of Warcraft or City of Heroes, which attract millions of users throughout the world every day. The last 20 years have also seen the growth of a new field of physics known as Physics Education Research (PER). This field consists of physicists dedicated to improving how we learn and teach the subject of physics. In this chapter, the author discusses his personal quest to combine PER with a MMOG and create an online virtual world dedicated to teaching Newtonian physics.
The perils of using simulations to evaluate Massively Multiplayer Online Game performance