Hi,

First of all I'd like to say hello to the forum and introduce myself. I'm a researcher at Nottingham Trent University (UK) who's in the fortunate position of having a job he loves - i.e. researching online computer games. I'm currently doing my PhD into how people express their identity in virtual environments - at the moment for me that means World of Warcraft, but all MMORPG's are good, as are contemporary virtual environments like Second Life, etc.

So, basically I'm here in the hope that some of you might want to be interviewed. I've checked with Certis and he says it's ok, so it's all official. Given that I'm in the UK I can't jump onto your server unfortunately, but hopefully we can work something out with MSN, Skype, Google, etc. if you're interested.

With respect to the interviews themselves, any data you give will be anonymised but not confidential - that means I can use quotes in my thesis but that I'll change you or your characters name if you wish, so you can't be identified. It'll just be an informal chat really where you can ramble on and I'll ask questions occasionally - and it should be said, I'm not going to be asking anything too personal and you don't have to answer a question if you don't want to.

Well, that's the official bit over, so I'll tell you about my game chars a bit. I've got two main chars at the moment - a L70 shadow priest (a curious combination of raid and PvP specced) and a L70 kitty druid, also raid specced although I'm thinking of turning him into PvP - a brave move indeed. I play on the Earthen Ring server (an RP one) and we're currently raiding Karazhan, although the Curator is causing us some trouble.

Anyway, if you'd like to give it a go or just want to ask some questions about the topics (or about me) then my email address is alexander.meredith2@ntu.ac.uk. Hope to hear from you soon.

Yours,

Alex.

p.s. oh, I'll check here as well of course, so if you just want to ask something here that's good too.