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.

WoW Rants: Cruising in the Aura of Command

Several posts have been made about what makes a good raid leader good. Matticus recently wrote about Aura of Command, commented to be a further working on Mirror Shields “Raid Leader Auras”. They both highlight the raid leaders need to band people together and get them to work towards a common goal, and that can [...]

Are you a threat to your school?

Recently the Norwegian police force decided to implement some preventative measures in regards to school shootings. Frightened by this new “trend” they have urged teachers to do an evaluation of their students in order to intercede before these trouble youngsters become killers. To do this the police have compiled a list of traits to [...]

Trying MMOs: Farmtown – Farming Facebook

I never quite “got” Facebook. A useful tool yes, a chance to look up friends and relatives from the past and keep up relations with them. Its not that I didnt see what Facebook could be used for, or how others were using it, it just never clicked with me. I could never spend more [...]

Trying MMOs: Age of Conan -Still hoping

I was always biast when it came to Age of Conan (AoC). I just really, really hoped that it would be a good game. I wanted it to be a success, because I wanted the Norwegian game industry to prove itself. Also, I wanted a new game to love. However, things didn’t go quite as [...]

Trying MMOs: Cause there is more to life then WoW

There is more to life then WoW. There are other MMOs too.
Terra Nova could report that during the State of Play conference, Bart Simon proposed the thought experiment of banning studies on World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life(SL) from big game journals such as Games and Culture. Why? Because the game studies field is [...]

How to make a homepage – or the illusion of finding it on the internet

After just handing in a enthusiastic essay on the need for games researchers to be transparent and accessible online, I figured I should live up to that argument. I already had a blog on blogspot, but I wanted something more. I wanted to have pictures, information about myself and my work easily accessible – and [...]

The end of WoW?

No game company will tell that they are on the decline, no company will say if players are leaving. So how can we know when a game looses its potency?
Wolfshead has used the tool Alexa to determine the use of the official World of Warcraft webpage, and looking over the last 22 months there [...]