The Effect of Online Role-Playing Games on Collaborative Skills

Abstract

Online role-playing games (ORPG), as one of the most commercially successful entertainment software programs, continue to expand in terms of income and user interaction, with players congregating in their virtual area and forming communities around them to support one another. With the exception of traditional offline computer games or networked games with a finite number of players, ORPGs are often seen as an environment with sophisticated dynamics of social interactions. As a result, it is considered that playing these games may produce collaborative skills in the players since they must continually engage with the game environment as well as other users. Qualitative methodologies are exploited to perform exploratory research on collaborative skills in Class RPG, an online educational RPG developed in Classcraft. The findings show that several sorts of collaborative skills arise during gameplay. While some of these collaborative skills cause significant challenges for even experienced players, players seem to find techniques to overcome them. It has been discovered that certain types of collaborative skills are actually beneficial in order to make the game more complicated. A series of guidelines are developed to assist game creators in dealing with collaborative skills.