seen on Terra Nova this morning
Games and culture is releasing the first academic journal, all articles are about wow. There is some academic research about video games, but things are quite small.
I didn't read these articles atm, but seems interesting.

The journal:
http://www.gamesandculture.com

abstracts:
Tanya Krzywinska and Henry Lowood
Guest Editors' Introduction

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore
Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft

T. L. Taylor
Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause

Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell
From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft
-> i think this one is for us...

Henry Lowood
Storyline, Dance/Music, or PvP?: Game Movies and Community Players in World of Warcraft

Tanya Krzywinska
Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories: World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft

Torill Elvira Mortensen
WoW is the New MUD: Social Gaming from Text to Video

How to get articles: juste have to register on the Sage website (academic distribution platform), publication is free of charge until january 2k7


Edit: how to get this

This looks awesome, thanks for the link :)

I stopped reading Terra Nova a while ago, when they got stuck on a RMT debate that degenerated into essentially well-worlded mud-slinging...

But Ill definitely check that out anyways. Sounds interesting.

It being a journal, you're going to have to either subscribe to it, or have access through a university or such that has a bulk subscription to the Sage Journals. Since I do have one, I'll have a nosy though, see if there's any real interesting content to the journal.

Edit: Interesting snippit, from the article cited in the OP:

Based on their sampling (the methodology of which seemed quite sound), 60% of people identified themselves as belonging to a "social" guild, 35% to a raid-oriented guild, nobody to a PvP oriented guild, and the remainder were in RP guilds.
Furthermore, about 20% of respondants stated that they would have preferred to join a different type of guild, but were unable to for some reason or other. It strikes me that the primary fraction of that number would be people in social guilds who want to move up to raiding or hard-core PvP (since it is comparatively easy to find a "social" guild, one would assume), which is certainly an interesting counterpoint to those who insist that some small, single-digit percentage of WoW players ever get to experience raid content.
Getting back to the article now to see if they address this point.

Edit again: It did address it, right there in the next paragraph, and echoed what I said just above.

Looks interesting

I read this one, and it's pretty boring. Nothing Nick Yee didn't already write about... omg, did you know there are big guilds, small guilds, social guilds, and raiding guilds? And some people join guilds by accident? And raiding guilds could be considered the "most glamorous' in wow? Some people make friends with their guildmates, some don't. And only a smattering of empirical evidence.

It's just a description, no real interesting or original claims.