Games, Leadership and Learning in Virtual Environments

From the very first Atari game that accidentally made its way into the hands of thousands who spent hours glued to analogue TV screens bouncing a static ball back and forth between players, to revivalist attempts at targeting specific demographics like the LGBT communities, gaming in all its protean forms has forever attracted humankind to the technological and other-worldly possibilities of this cyber-frontier. In addition to the rebirth of gaming companies, games themselves have transcended from the first-person controlled environments of Dungeons and Dragons, to the subscription-based, massively multiplayer online environments of World of Warcraft, to the current educational fashion of MOOCs. The potential for research into these mediums, especially the very interesting concept of how the personality of the human user influences the avatar selection and behavioural interaction in the virtual arena, and the storytelling and community-building opportunities in these mediums is explored by our authors in this stream of ELVW.