Welcome!

My name is Kristine Ask and I am a PhD student at NTNU studying online culture in MMORPGs. I am not always sure when I am a gamer and when I am a researcher, but then perhaps I am not supposed to always separate them. This site will tell about my work and my passion for games.

Achievements and how they made me care.

Sicne the introduction of the achievementsystem in WoW, I have been rampantly against it. I find no enjoyment in fulfilling random tasks to be awarded points, which in turn can only be used on vanity things such as titles or mounts.
Its just not my cup of tea.
If we have an instance on farm, I [...]

And then you get the boot…

Continuing on the whole process of joining and leaving guilds, I wish to bring up a few examples of different ways I have seen people leave guilds I have been in. I think they exemplify how differently how people seem to think about what a guild is, what commitment is and what the community is [...]

Application: Strongsquig [declined]

One central point of raidingguilds is the churn of members. Ofcourse there is a steady core that keeps on going, that keeps the guild together, does the work etc. But there is always some kind of flux when it comes to members. I have always had a facination for this particular aspect of running a [...]

When Azeroth is too big.

People who have bothered themselves with trying to find out the actual size of Azeroth (the gameworld in WoW fyi), have concluded that is quite small. If you use people and buildings as the items setting the scale, each continent is about the size of Manhattans (Aarseth 2008).
Its tiny.
So why am I having such [...]