My original idea... MMORPGs, are great for overscoping!

My Original Idea

I had originally been hoping to focus my dissertation on making a design document for an MMORPG*, as I am very interested in how the genre could be used.

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*MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), is a game  genre where a large number of people are able to connect to the same server, at any time. The server acts as a persistent world which which will change and evolve even while players are logged off.

I find this genre very interesting because the player takes control of one (often) personalized character which 'grows' with the player over time and through all this player gets easily immersed in the game.

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Unfortunately I later found out that the design document would be good to show the theory of what I learnt from my research, however I would still need a method of presenting something practical. The most obvious way of doing this would be to code an entire MMORPG based on my design document.

Needless to say, this idea is far beyond what I can do so I ultimately gave up on it and started thinking on more feasible ideas.