'Cyberanthropology' first was brought to the Institute of Sociocultural Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich by Castulus Kolo. His work again bears fruit: The article Living a Virtual Life: Social Dynamics of Online Gaming (which he wrote together with Timo Baur, a former student of our institute) was published recently. Excerpt from the Introduction:

"Interactive online games for more than two players or multiplayer online games have become a popular object of investigation ever since social and cultural sciences began studying the Internet. Whilst initial studies on online games mainly focused on text-based virtual realities (e.g. Bartle, 1990; Bartle, 1996; Bruckman, 1992; Curtis, 1996), over the course of the last few years there has been an increasing number of publications dedicated to games with a graphical user interface and several thousands of users playing simultaneously. This development has been accompanied by a series of related conferences and the establishment of specific publication platforms as well as research associations (for example, Aarseth, 2001). In the US, game research, or game studies, has even become a topic covered by the general interest news media (for example, Erard, 2004). However, in Germany apart from being covered as a business issue, this new field is only addressed by sporadic research, of which hardly any is based on rich empirical data (Goetzenbrucker, 2001 being one of the few exceptions)."

KOLO, CASTULUS AND TIMO BAUR. 2004. Living a Virtual Life: Social Dynamics of Online Gaming. Game Studies 4(1). Electronic Document. Available online: www.gamestudies.org

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