Investigating the knowledge structure of research on massively multiplayer online role-playing games: A bibliometric analysis

As the concept of the Metaverse rapidly spread, massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), one of the Metaverse games, received public's attention again. Additionally, MMORPGs have garnered significant academic interest in multidisciplinary fields, including human-computer interaction, computer science, and psychology. This study provides a general overview of the knowledge structures on MMORPGs in various academic fields using a bibliometric approach. To this end, we collected articles on MMORPGs published between 2001 and 2021 from the Web of Science. Then, main research forces in the field of MMORPGs are identified by examining productive authors, institutions, and countries/regions. Additionally, we applied VOSviewer to conduct co-citation analyses for identifying highly cited authors, journals, and literatures on MMORPGs. The results revealed that the USA and South Korea are the most productive countries. In addition, players' motivation, players' demographics, in-game social interaction, and pathological usage are the main research topics in the field. We expect that our results will help researchers and stakeholders to gain a general understanding of the development of the MMORPG academic field.