If I had my time again...

We're just about to go to advert for some PhD's on http://www.findaphd.com/ (which of course I'll add when the advert is up!) , but scanning through various different institutions adverts it was frankly interesting to see what was out there right now, and it got me thinking what I might do if I had my time again. The one that caughtmy eye was "Sanctioning mechanisms and the formation of collective patterns of behaviour in a multiplayer virtual online gaming community." which when you read the ideas behind the PhD and what they'll fund you (yes, fully funded! I was amazed too!) sounded great:

Specific aspects of the investigation will include: the emergence of friendship and co-operative dynamics (the incorporation of players into groups such as game ‘guilds’, for example) and the related aspects of trust and co-ordination; the emergence of internal etiquettes (i.e. ‘chatiquete’ and rules of online communication (Merchant, 2001; Bordia, 1996) and the sanctioning of saboteurs and the violation of ‘norms’ (Smith, 2006); analysis of conversational dynamics characterized by a lack of embodied non-verbal language cues (Manninen & Kujanpaa, 2002) - that is, an analysis of how these dynamics amount to social phenomena emerging in virtual realities (Curtis,1992; Jones, 1995).

That said, University of West Scotland? Well, it may be just me and the sheep, but since I'd only (in this insane world of doing my PhD again) be mainly studying computer games again, I'm sure just a strong broadband connection would see you through those 3-4 years of your life.