Combining educational MMO games with real sporting events

The concept of the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game is well established, with several multimillion euro productions (such as World of Warcraft and Eve Online) demonstrating the appeal of the genre. Yet few, if any, of these games bring any aspect of real-time, real-world data into the game. Sporting events, such as the Barcelona World Race sailing regatta, increasingly provide such live real time data, which can be integrated within a game environment to create a MMO competition between 'virtual' competitors and 'real' competitors. This paper presents the planning, design, implementation and overview of an educational MMO game to accompany the Barcelona World Race 2010/2011, and discusses the differences in design and implementation for games of this type.