Jul 14
Leet Noobs
As part of a poster session on the development of expertise in everyday contexts at the International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS), I created a poster that contrasts two phases of expertise development in World of Warcraft.
I also presented the same topic at Games Learning Society (GLS) a week later, but instead of using a poster, I printed out hand-outs and a map of a fight in Molten Core along with little paper figures to demonstrate with interactives what a raid fight looked like.
This page is meant to document the various iterations of this topic, and it will eventually include drafts of a paper I’m writing on it (due September 1).
First some background:
The first phase of WoW is while a player is leveling a character for the first time. Expertise is defined by learning the game mechanics, the abilities of the character class being played, etc. Basically, efficiency in killing things while playing alone or with a small group. In this phase, things like aggro management, positioning, etc. are not that important. A player who does this phase well is an expert player, aka, a leet player. (And, of course, things are a bit more individual/situated-context dependent than that, but, in general, I think this makes sense.)
The second phase occurs when an expert player joins a raid group and has to adapt his or her practice to work on a team. This phase is much more social, and, in fact, from the get-go successful access to a regular raid group depends on a player’s social capital and networks. Once in a group, max DPS (damage per second) is no longer the most efficient way of killing monsters. Instead, each character class has a specific role to play, whether it’s tanking, healing, decursing, doing damage, or what have you. The coordinated and collective effort of the group members is important.
The group works on a distributed level and the whole group is often considered one entity, but at the same time individual players have to keep track of their own actions. The process of learning and keeping track of personal stuff while maintaining relationships and successfully communicating and coordinating with the group is the new definition of expertise. The new raid activity requires new expertise. Thus leet players become leet noobs, experts who seem like newbies since they are in a new social context.
Here’s the abstract I submitted to both ICLS and GLS (the poster itself has a bigger reference section):
Leet noobs: Expert World of Warcraft players relearning and adapting expertise in new contexts
World of Warcraft (WoW), like many other massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), can actually be seen as two different games. The first is the journey of exploring the game world and advancing the abilities of one’s character or avatar either through solo play or in groups of up to five players. This acts as a proving grounds or gateway for the second stage of WoW—joining a raid group of up to 40 players to kill all the monsters in “high-end” or “endgame” dungeons for the treasures they guard. Within a larger online games ethnography (Chen, in review) similar to others that describe player practice and learning (Steinkuehler, 2007, and Taylor, 2006), I have found that invitation to join an end-game group is contingent on a player’s reputation as an expert of WoW’s underlying mechanics and rules. It is also necessary, however, to have proven oneself as someone who works well with others and understands his or her particular role in a team. Upon joining a raid group, players soon find that the conditions that determine expertise have changed because the activities and player practices have changed to fit the local context, which includes raid-specific tactics and new communication norms. It becomes clear that expertise is specialized for individual roles, depending on character type, and that to succeed as a raid group, players need to draw on their distributed expertise and knowledge (Hutchins, 1995), each doing their part while trusting others to do the same, so that collectively they act as a coordinated whole. Yet the actual skills and abilities an individual player uses are reassessed for how well they complement other players’ resources. Thus, once-expert players become novices or “noobs” to relearn expert or “leet” gameplay, yet they are not true novices because they already have a good understanding of the game system. Rather, they are leet noobs who must realign and adapt their expertise for new social structures and norms that emerge above the underlying game through joint venture. This poster highlights examples of learning individual expertise as well as new distributed expertise needed for raid group success.
Chen, M. (pending). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Steinkuehler, C. (2007). Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. eLearning, 4(3), 297-318.
Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. The MIT Press.
Here are the various iterations of the poster:
