Here Be (No More) Dragons: Pushing the Frontier of Research on Virtual Organizations and Teams

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) offer new promising opportunities to research virtual organizations and teams. The characteristics of MMOGs allow researchers to obtain objective data from a large and multi-national population. Lasting over months or even years, MMOGs facilitate longitudinal studies and ensure a high involvement of participants. Moreover, collecting data from online surveys and game servers keeps the costs of MMOG studies low. In this paper, we show with two exemplary studies how research in MMOGs can utilize these opportunities to overcome some limitations of traditional research environments. Moreover, we discuss the role of MMOGs as the avant-garde of information and communication technology (ICT) usage and therefore argue that research in MMOGs can provide a glimpse into the future application of ICT in real life organizations.