This is Wynncraft, a gorgeous fantasy MMO that you can play on a Minecraft server.

It probably wasn't coincidence that Shane Murphy returned my call just after I'd thrown my third interception in NCAA '09 and punched off the machine in full perfectionist disgust. Murphy, a professor and researcher of psychology at Western Connecticut State, would later explain that I exhibited classic high-ego, low-task gamer behaviour. That is, I am fixated on being seen as a winner, and not the process of becoming one.

Murphy approaches video gaming as a sports psychologist, with 30 years of experience in that field. The American Psychological Association's annual convention in August 2008 discussed research showing the benefits video games deliver in learning and problem solving. Also at the convention, Murphy gave a presentation advocating for the study of competitive and cooperative behaviour in gamers.

Despite a unique setting, inventive quests and genuinely creepy vibe, Funcom's supernatural MMO The Secret World doesn't get a lot of play, so they're taking all of the content from that game and putting it into a free-to-play online action RPG called Secret World Legends.

Remember Tera, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game with the really cool combat system that came out on PC back in 2012? The free-to-play game is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year.

After nearly 12 years in operation, Disney's kid-friendly MMO Club Penguin is closing, but not before players get a chance to realise one of the game's longest-running memes. The iceberg has tipped.

Seventeen-year-old MMORPG Asheron's Call shut down for good today at 4:00AM AEDT. Beloved characters gathered one final time, and then disappeared.

The MMO formerly known as Everquest Next Landmark, Landmark is closing down next month.

EVE Online can get pretty intense. From battles that cost $US300,000 ($396,368) in damages to histories so complex that a book was written about them, the long running MMO can get very serious. Now, a personal disagreement has led to a hefty bounty.

Knights of the Eternal Throne, a new story heavy expansion for BioWare's Star Wars MMO will release on December 2. It will continue the story set in the previous expansion, Knight of the Fallen Empire. The announcement featured one kickarse trailer.

Take Neil deGrasse Tyson, the eminent astrophysicist and all-around popular science ambassador. Now take an MMO, give a VR coat of paint, and dress it up with a gigantic universe where people can grow galaxies, build planets and nurture civilisations.

That's the pitch for Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents Space Odyssey, anyway.

At Furcadia's September town meeting, a hundred humanoid animals lounged on purple pillows in a lush, 32-bit meadow. Emerald Flame, Executive Producer of the oldest social MMORPG, was explaining Furcadia's largest update since its 1996 founding to the motley pile of furry avatars, known in-game as "furres." It was called the "Second Dreaming."

Before the recent wave of excitement around new virtual reality technology convinced everyone that the future was inside of a headset, people longing to escape the constraints of their everyday lives invested their hopes and dreams in ugly looking worlds housed on distant computer servers. Massively multiplayer online games offered a meaningful substitute to the real world not because of how faithfully it could duplicate it, but because of how little it tried to.

What are dungeon runs for? In Final Fantasy XIV, you run dungeons because you have to. Fittingly, in FFXIV they're called "Duties".

Korean MMO Black Desert Online — yes, the pretty one — recently made a change to the game's economy. To say players are pissed would be to sell it a little short.

I didn't expect to get so into StarBreak. It's a free-to-play sidescrolling MMO — think Contra, but with, like, 30 other people swarming around you — where every death counts. If you die, loot and stats go out the window. Despite that, it's weirdly relaxing to play.

Space combat/trading MMO EVE Online has a new expansion called Citadel. Even as someone who doesn't play the game, I am very impressed by the scale of what's going on here.

After two years of relative peace, various recent events are dragging the players of online space MMO EVE Online towards another massive war. This time it's between the game's biggest coalition, The Imperium, against an alliance of smaller factions.

Active Worlds is an MMO from 1995 that nobody really plays anymore. That's where this story begins.

The fun with MMOs, RPGs or games that use elements of both is that the statistics behind them can get very tricky. And if you're playing something that takes elements from both those genres and happens to have a heavy PvP element, it's worth knowing how all the stats works.

That's especially true for people who have been enjoying The Division, a game that is rapidly growing a strong following. Fortunately one bloke has broken down everything you need to know.