What can World of Warcraft teach people about the great philosophical concepts of our time? That's a question that intrigued John Nordlinger of Microsoft Research, head of the Games For Learning Institute in New York, and co-editor with Luke Cuddy of the recently released, "World of Warcraft and Philosophy," which pulls together writings and observations from numerous academics on the subject.

Add this to the list of books written and edited Microsoft employees this fall. In an interview, Nordlinger discussed the book and explained how philosophical lessons can be applied to the popular online multiplayer role-playing game. Read on for edited excerpts from our conversation.

What's the concept behind the book? If you imagine that you're interested in Nietzsche, but you're not really sure if you could pursue Nietzschean ethics, a lot of folks get away with that in World of Warcraft. They loot from their friends, they do whatever they can to become more powerful. And then they can kind of feel what that's like, and it's really hard to get away with doing that in a day-to-day existence. But you can do it for a little while in a massively multiplayer game. Eventually people get wise to you, but it's a safer environment for exploring philosophical concepts. Certainly Nietzsche and Machiavelli are two of the easiest examples.

Is the idea to give people a different way of experiencing World of Warcraft, or is it to use World of Warcraft to understand philosophy? It's exactly both. When people play World of Warcraft, they will think a little bit more thoughtfully. But it's also to say, hey, I'm not really interested in philosophy, but I love World of Warcraft, and I wonder why I always pick a female night elf, if that says anything about me. Well, you can get that answered at least ethically in the book.

Is your target readership primarily World of Warcraft players, or is it broader than that? It's primarily World of Warcraft players. My mother claims she finds it amusing, my sister got a kick out of it. Most people who don't play World of Warcraft, they see it as an anthropological study into a realm they never even knew existed. But really we're looking at people that play World of Warcraft a certain amount of hours a day. We'd hope that they would find this book meaningful ... and would both satisfy their need to feel like they're doing something with the game and enriching themselves.

Is World of Warcraft uniquely suited to a study of philosophy, or could you do this with any video game? I think you could do it with some other video games. Some games are better than others. One of the reasons why World of Warcraft is so good is because there's so many people. You can pursue different avenues. EverQuest is a very similar game, and you have about 400,000 people in total playing that, in contrast to 12 million with World of Warcraft. When you have this huge amount of people, you get the combination of the wisdom of the crowd, and this bizarre little economy, which is becoming a significant economy. There's more money flowing through World of Warcraft than there is some European nations. As a result, there's incredible opportunity for some really interesting pursuits with really meaningful groups of people. In some of these other games, you just don't have the populations. You can still pursue some things, like what's it like to behave exclusively selfishly or exclusively pursuing power, or what's it like if you're a healer and you're just expected to heal people all the time, how does that feel.

Could you imagine college courses being built around this book? There already are. The University of Victoria is evaluating it currently, and there's some other schools that are looking at it. Philosophy is a funny thing. If you really teach a nice philosophy class, you should improve the person's writing. You should improve their abstract thinking. And they should get a real hunger for answering tough questions. I think we do that in this book.

Obviously this could change the way people think about World of Warcraft. Do you think it could change the way they play World of Warcraft? I think it would. I don't think, if you read the book, you'd ever play World of Warcraft the same. You'd have more awareness of the consequences of your actions, and what sort of ethical decisions you were making when you were doing things. It's very easy to play World of Warcraft and just play, sort of, sometimes bad. Sometimes you don't share the loot quite as equally, or sometimes you don't help people quite as often. And I think if you read what behaviors and what ethics those are reflecting, I think afterward, you would probably at least make more aware decisions, if not different decisions.