Leet Noobs: An ethnographic look at communication, collaboration, expertise, and socialization in a World of Warcraft player group
Background
Ethnography of raiding
Games and learning
Setting: World of Warcraft
Activity system: Raiding
Analyses
Communication, coordination, and camaraderie
Social nature of expertise
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.
Theorizing the activity: Distributed Cognition, Actor-Network Theory, and timescales
Visualization of chat to uncover patterns of interaction
Analysis Methods: Functional Pattern Analysis and interaction analysis
The enrollment of a new actor and the redistribution of responsibilities
Everyday learning and expertise
Presentation at ICLS 2008: Poster representing early concept of expertise development
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
Mark Chen markchen@uw.edu @mcdanger
adaptability
communication and coordination skills
playfulness and problem solving
performance, identity shifting, and metacognition
systems thinking and networking
continual feedback
emergent patterns to be identified and acted on for success
rule systems, many with clear goals
incremental rewards and challenges

expertise (ie, literacy) exists in a multitude of contexts
becoming an expert requires access to expert situated practice
accrual of social and cultural capital
Necessary 21st century skills
Good games provide
Games are often played in situated contexts that are social and distributed.
http://newmedialiteracies.org
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12771
http://gameslearningsociety.org/
Map of Molten Core. Each dot represents a monster that the player group encountered.
Ragnaros, the last monster in Molten Core. 
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
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://worldofwarcraft.com
player groups focusing on difficult joint-tasks for greater reward
necessitates careful coordination and specialization
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/
More resources on ethnography and games research

Molten Core
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. 
Original slides from Games Learning Society 2007 presentation:
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
a discussion of charts and other visualizations used to identify patterns in the communicative practices of the group and to locate moments of disruption 
Sample visualizations:
a more general description of the historical, socially dependent nature of playing World of Warcraft and what it means to be an expert player
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. 
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.
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.
http://markdangerchen.net
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.
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.
Future work 
Expertise and collaboration in online gaming
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.