The Mangle of Play
Game challenges and player workarounds
Small Worlds & 
Tiny Acts of 
Subversion
WoW Raiding Dependent on Mods
Pre-determined phrases:
BarbieGirls: 323
Nicktropolis: 634
Club Penguin: 322
Toontown: 228
Cross-promotional references:
BarbieGirls: 75
Nicktropolis: 237
Emergent Play
"Designed Emergence"
Friend lists rather than guilds
Groups formed around performance (performatives) and display of virtual "commodities"
Exchange of knowledge & "cheats" (broadly defined)
Make-believe play scenarios
Examples of user initiative

Safe Chat Mechanisms
Peer Play & Groupings
Performatives & "Flash Mobs"
Guild Leadership
Newcomers
to a raid group
What are the forms of practice in which a newcomer participates?
How does newcomer experience with the activity influence participation? 
How does newcomer social status with the team influence participation?


VENT:
...they summon like every 3k it looks like, I've been noticing. Or less. Um everyone's going to be in this corner, downing the Shaman. It's not going to be like short; it's going to take a while to down each one; they have like 20k each…
Um there's gonna be four waves that we have to deal with, we're going to fight them down here. Um, there's going to be a tank and a minstrel over here tanking this big giant in red that you see.
Don't worry about them, for the mean time. After - on the fourth wave, we're going to keep one of them alive, everyone is going to go into this corner that I am in right now. 

NO VENT:
I'll just tell him to focus on someone's target.

Unanticipated Uses: 
- Gender Bending 
- Subverting gendered subjectivities
Mark Chen | Ben DeVane | Sara M Grimes | Sarah E Walter | Moses Wolfenstein
Sometimes difficult to make sense of what was going on in a WoW fight.
 UI helped players interpret what is going on.
Various UI elements do different things.
Notably, the threat meter helped us remember.
World of Warcraft raiding depended on a group's ability to monitor and manage its performance. A mod was created (early 2006) to help players keep track of a specific performance number, "threat."

By redistributing their cognition and responsibilities to a nonhuman actor, players could diagnose moments of failure and change their practice for future success.

Using the mod became common practice, which had a normalizing effect on what it meant to play WoW. WoW playing became even more numbers-centric and less about role-playing or other ways of interacting with the game and the social community.
Themes:
Channel of communication influences interaction.
Social familiarity with a group interacts with skill in activity.
Games as designed challenges and innovative player solutions.
Dialectic of resistance and accommodation.
Design Challenges Intertwined with Commercial Content and Priorities
Narrow margins of manoeuvre afford highly reflexive forms of player initiative (workarounds, etc.)
The Mangle of 
(Identity) Play
Identity in 
Digital Media and Learning
Learning is, in this purview, 
more basically 
a process of coming to be,
of forging identities 
in activity in the world. (Lave, 1992)

Research Context
Summary of Findings
Social Resources
Material Resources
Cultural Resources
The Mangle of Play - Constance Steinkuehler (2006)

"The game that's actually played by participants is not the game designers originally had in mind but rather one that is the outcomes of an interactively established (Pickering, 1995) "mangle of practice" of designers, players, in-game currency farmers, and broader social norms."
Contact Us!

Mark Chen (University of Washington): 
markchen@uw.edu @mcdanger

Ben DeVane (University of Wisconsin, Madison) :
ben.devane@gmail.com

Sara M. Grimes (Simon Fraser University):
smgrimes@sfu.ca

Sarah E. Walter (Stanford University):
swalt@stanford.edu

Moses Wolfenstein (University of Wisconsin, Madison): moses.wolfenstein@gmail.com
Data collection: Participant-observation (~ 2 yrs)
Video capture of ~ 5 months of activity
Interviews with key informants
Survey on raiding in LOTRO (N>500)

Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO)
Analysis of language: level of analysis is the where “social action takes place” (Linde, 1988)
Mitigating language: Linde, 1988
Positioning: Harré & Van Langenhove, 1991
Face-saving: Brown and Levinson, 1987

“participation in social practice is the fundamental form of learning”

- Lave & Wenger, 1991
Research Questions
Gameplay is:
messy and complex
multiple competing visions and goals
different parties find different ways to achieve their goals
not confined to just the space of the game
The Mangle
...the contours of material agency are mangled in practice, meaning emergently transformed and delineated in the dialectic of resistance and accommodation (Pickering, 1993)