Leet Noobs

Expertise and collaboration in online gaming

Everyday learning and expertise

Necessary 21st century skills

Good games provide

Games are often played in situated contexts that are social and distributed.

Activity system: Raiding

Theorizing the activity: Distributed Cognition, Actor-Network Theory, and timescales

Analysis Methods: Functional Pattern Analysis and interaction analysis

an ethnographic description of the logistics of raiding and the communicative practices of a group on a typical night in Molten Core, contrasted with an atypical night and the resultant realignment work needed to repair the atypical night’s failures

• Communication happened in layers, divided by specialized roles
• Success depended on a minimum level of trust, which in this case was based off of camaraderie.

a discussion of charts and other visualizations used to identify patterns in the communicative practices of the group and to locate moments of disruption

• Visualization tools can be useful in identifying patterns of communication activity for further analyses.
• Raid leader did most of the talking.
• Women participated disproportionately less.

a more general description of the historical, socially dependent nature of playing World of Warcraft and what it means to be an expert player

• Expertise defined by socially situated expert practice, not mentalistic notions of knowledge.
• Becoming an expert player depends on access to expert groups.
• Access depends on the successful build up of social and cultural capital.
• Not all players are positioned to do this successfully.

• Raiding activity distributed across multiple human and nonhuman actors.
• Becoming a successful group required innovative enrollment of nonhuman actor to network and ability of a sub-group to elevate their repair communication to whole raid group.
• Repair work took time, required moments of reflection, and occurred over multiple play sessions across different raid settings.

Mark Chen markchen@uw.edu @mcdanger

http://markdangerchen.net

This work would not be possible without the support from the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center and is funded by the National Science Foundation through the Science of Learning Center program under grant SBE-0354453.

Molten Core

http://newmedialiteracies.org

• 40 players teamed up to defeat monsters in Molten Core
• met 2 or 3 times a week for 9 months, 4 or 5 hours each time
• players were not of the same in-game guild but were part of a larger existing social circle

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12771

• Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning an literacy.
• Jenkins, H., et al. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture.

• National Research Council. (2010). Exploring the intersection of science education and 21st century skills.

• Stevens, R., Satwicz, T., & McCarthy, L. (2008). In-game, in-room, in-world: Reconnecting video game play to the rest of kids’ lives. In K. Salen (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (41-66).
• Collins, H. & Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking expertise.
• Games Learning Society
• Malaby, T. (2009). Making virtual worlds.

Further reading

• expertise (ie, literacy) exists in a multitude of contexts
• becoming an expert requires access to expert situated practice
• accrual of social and cultural capital

http://gameslearningsociety.org/

Games and learning

Ethnography of raiding

More resources on ethnography and games research

• continual feedback
• emergent patterns to be identified and acted on for success
• rule systems, many with clear goals
• incremental rewards and challenges

• adaptability
• communication and coordination skills
• playfulness and problem solving
• performance, identity shifting, and metacognition
• systems thinking and networking

• Steinkuehler, C. A. (2007). Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. E-Learning, 4(3), 297-318.
• Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds.
• Malaby, T. (2009). Making virtual worlds.
• Games and Culture

http://gac.sagepub.com/

Background

Character creation screen

Custom user interface

• Massively multiplayer online game
• Each player controls an archetypal hero
• Complete quests and kill monsters for loot and experience

http://worldofwarcraft.com

• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild.
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social.
• Lemke, J. (2000). Across the scales of time. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 271-290.

Setting: World of Warcraft

• player groups focusing on difficult joint-tasks for greater reward
• necessitates careful coordination and specialization

• Rogoff, B., Topping, K., Baker-Sennett, J., & Lacasa, P. (2002). Mutual contributions of individuals, partners, and institutions: Planning to remember in girl scout cookie sales. Social Development, 11(1), 266-289.

Map of Molten Core. Each dot represents a monster that the player group encountered.

Ragnaros, the last monster in Molten Core.

Leet Noobs: An ethnographic look at communication, collaboration, expertise, and socialization in a World of Warcraft player group

Social nature of expertise

Communication, coordination, and camaraderie

Takeaways

• Collaboration depends on trust. Specialized roles, stabilization of shared goals, and camaraderie helps build trust.
• Expertise develops with access to expert practice and successful accrual of social and cultural capital.
• Adopting new tools requires time and is situated in ecological contexts.

Presentation at ICLS 2008: Poster representing early concept of expertise development

Original slides from Games Learning Society 2007 presentation:

Analyses

Visualization of chat to uncover patterns of interaction

The enrollment of a new actor and the redistribution of responsibilities

Future work

Sample visualizations:

• Design and study adoption of new media and technology for learning environments.
• Research ways to foster collaboration through trust and camaraderie building.
• Continue to study expertise development in informal settings, particularly with underrepresented or marginalized groups.