1. iConference – February 8-11, Seattle – attended
2. Digital Media and Learning (DML) – March 3-5, LA – attending
3. Cultural Studies Association (CSA) – March 24-26, Chicago – Not attending since it conflicts with iSLC but helped form the Workshop on Cultures in Game/worlds with Jeremy Hunsinger and Adrienne Massanari.
4. inter-Science of Learning Center (iSLC) – March 25-27, DC – Creating a prototype poster on the actor-network theory chapter of my dissertation.
5. National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) – April 3-6, Orlando – Sandy Toro Martell is running a panel on games and science ed with Doug Clark, Alex Games, Robb Lindgren, Reed Stevens, Debora B. Wisneski, Heather Toomey Zimmerman, and Susan M. Land. (I think I missed a couple of names…)
6. American Educational Researchers Association (AERA) – April 8-12, New Orleans – “The Enrollment of a New Technology and the Subsequent Redistribution of Roles and Responsibilities in an Online Game” (roundtable paper) is a shortened early version of my dissertation chapter on ANT and WoW. It doesn’t go into much depth and primarily acts to introduce game concepts and the network of technical resources in the game. I’m also in a panel “Socially Situated Expert Practice In and Around Gaming” with Phil Bell, Leah Bricker, Sean Duncan, Rebecca Reynolds, and Moses Wolfenstein.
7. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) – May 7-12, Vancouver – Considering attending since it’s so close, but didn’t submit anything and it’s hella expensive (~$1000).
8. Games Learning Society Conference (GLS) – June 15-17, Madison, WI – Moses and I are keen to organize a panel on games and learning dissertations
9. Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) – June 28-July 1, Bourdeux, France – Probably not going since I didn’t submit anything, but many of my colleagues in computer science are. This is the same conference that used to be on a cruise ship. I am a reviewer, though, and now that I’ve seen all the papers that got submitted, I regret not submitting something since my work wouldn’t have competed with anyone else’s submission. Oh well.
10. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) – July 4-8, Hong Kong – The sister conference to ICLS, one of the main conferences in my field. My paper presentation “How a New Actor Was Temporarily Enrolled Into the Network of Game Playing” is a more refined version of my write-up on the mangle and assemblage involved with playing WoW. The version for AERA lays the groundwork for thinking about the sociomaterial nature of games and learning, while this one will get into detailed nuances of my specific case. (The longest, most detailed version of the write-up is in review at a journal.)
11. Casual Connect – July 19-21, Seattle – Might not be going due to cost (~$400) and I may be conferenced out. But I have a strong desire to network with the industry better.
12. family reunion – July 25-August 3, Hawaii
13. SIGGRAPH – August 7-11, Vancouver – Reviewed for this but didn’t submit anything. This, like CHI (both ACM conferences) is quite expensive (~$1000). Also, like CHI, it’s in Vancouver, which makes it tempting, oh so tempting.
14. Digital Media and Learning Research Associates Summer Institute – August 15-19, UC Irvine – Woot! Only 12 of us got in to this week-long program. My project will be to create a web-mediated interactive and visualized version of my dissertation!
15. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) – September 14-17, Utrecht, The Netherlands – I love Utrecht and Amsterdam. Kris Ask is organizing a panel on theorycrafting! I’m thinking I might submit something on the dissolution of a raid group in WoW (chapter 4 of the diss).
16. Internet Research (IR12) – October 10-13, Seattle – Angling to be on a panel with Sean Duncan, Mia Consalvo, and TL Taylor. Current plan is to present something on boardgamegeek users who create custom versions of out-of-print board games.

Draft papers for the above conferences:

• The Enrollment of a New Technology and the Subsequent Redistribution of Roles and Responsibilities in an Online Game – meant to be a shorter introduction to actor-network theory (Latour) and how the threat meter modification was adopted into my gaming group’s practice
• How a New Actor Was Temporarily Enrolled Into the Network of Game Playing – meant to be a longer discussion on actor-network theory in relation to the mangle of (gaming) practice (Pickering; Steinkuehler) and the assemblage of play (TL Taylor) and a deeper look into the ramifications of dynamic, destabilized networks

Comparing the two papers above… I should and will spend some time to make them much more significantly different. I don’t want to present the same thing at both places.

• Proposal for DML Summer Institute

The chapter is on how the introduction of a threat meter addon changed my raid group’s practice over time.

Continued from http://markdangerchen.net/2010/01/19/enrollment-of-threat-meter-addon-work-in-progress/ and http://markdangerchen.net/2010/04/06/enrollment-of-threat-meter-addon-part-2/

About four months into our raid’s life, in February [or March?] of 2006, we started using a new addon called “KLHTM” or “KTM.”

Created by a player named Kenco, KTM did the work of keeping track of which abilities a particular player used while fighting a monster, how much threat those abilities generated, and then visually displayed that information to that player. What’s more, any instance of KTM could talk to other instances of KTM installed on other people’s machines and thereby aggregate all of the threat data for all players who had the addon installed, displaying relational charts of everyone’s threat level to each player.

<more after break>

[image of KTM here]

This allowed the offloading of human cognition to a nonhuman resource, effectively eliminating much of the guess work that went into World of Warcraft fights.

Before the addon, my raid group had progressed to the last boss in Molten Core. The write-up about our practice found in the Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie paper describes how our chat was multi-threaded and interleaved, hierarchical and specialized, roughly divided by class role. Among many other things, one thing this allowed us to do was to be highly coordinated in our tactical take-down of a raid boss. By the time KTM was introduced, we had become quite proficient in dividing up our attentional resources and communicating along certain channels, escalating which channels were in use when necessary. After KTM became the standard, the necessity of using those chat channels was not as acute as before. Suddenly, any player of any class could keep track of the threat generated of all the other players. Not only did the addon help us with our cognition, it’s use also forever changed who communicated with whom about what, most notably allowing raid leaders to caution specific raiders about their threat generation. This effectively substituted knowledge-based trust in others with a technological advancement where trust or faith in other players’ ability to manage their threat didn’t matter. Yet, at the same time, KTM let us be much more efficient in our monster killing. We could ride the edge much more effectively, thereby taking down monsters faster than we had been before, which also lowered the learning curve associated with new encounters.

Kenco’s Threat Meter is an interesting example of Latour’s recognition that objects within an activity system may have multi-layered complex histories. The emergent network or arrangement of the objects in circulation, likewise, is complex and multi-layered, both in a micro to macro scale of physical closeness and across multiple timescales. [find quotes from Reassembling the Social to use here.. multiple ways of thinking about the shape of the network] KTM’s history is rooted in a gaming tradition of deconstructing [decrypting/decoding?] the underlying mechanics or math of a game, which, as a practice, probably existed shortly after the first game. Games, after all, essentially present players with some sort of system of rules or simulation to uncover. Pattern recognition is the main learning activity a gamer does. Early widespread understanding and taking advantage of the game rules probably came about with the rise in table-top role-playing games, most notably Dungeons & Dragons, where the practice of creating a character that exploited the game mechanics was called min-maxing–minimizing resources spent on relatively useless abilities and skills to maximize resources spent on the most effective abilities and skills. This was only possible after a player was able to grasp the underlying mechanics and figure out particularly effective combinations of abilities for specific situations. With the rise of digital role-playing and strategy games (particularly Starcraft) and access to web forums where players could discuss, debate, and co-construct their models about various game mechanics, the practice became known as theorycrafting, taking the name from the IC [double check this and reference Chris Paul's work maybe].

[something about how D&D became about numbers rather than role-playing?]

Kenco was one of the early theorycrafters for World of Warcraft. In January 2006, he posted to the WoW European web forums that he thought it was possible to run a number of in-game tests, systematically testing out different variables, to uncover how WoW calculates threat. At the time of his posting, in fact, he had run several of these simulations, and he proceeded to discuss his findings, dispelling quite a few myths about threat generation. This was counter to the general thought that exact threat mechanics were forever going to be hidden from the player community.

It’s often said that we will never be able to work out the way threat and hate lists and mobs’ AI works, because it’s too complicated and unknowable, that we’ll only ever have crude approximations and guesses. I’ve conducted some decent, rigorous tests, and i have what i believe is a good list of hate values and explanations of gaining and losing aggro and the behaviour of taunt. I am also able to debunk a few myths about how threat works.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Kenco’s_research_on_threat

After carefully describing his major findings, he gave a list of suggestions for strategies to use in future fights and then ended his post with this: “There’s no amazing super secret randomised blizzard aggro algorithm. The concepts are simple and the values can be fitted with nice numbers. Even formulas for threat-reducing knockbacks can conceivably be worked out, if threat values are carefully monitored.”

In February [or March?] players started testing out Kenco’s first stabs at a threat meter addon, and on March 1, 2006 (according to Curse’s records), he released the first public version of KTM to Curse.com, a website devoted to hosting a World of Warcraft addon repository.

Since then, theorycrafting became common practice, probably most popularized by the site ElitistJerks.com, where class-based discussion boards devoted to damage and threat calculations feature players using sophisticated spreadsheets and custom tools to model and number-crunch every known, manipulable in-game variable. Figuring out threat and then exposing the underlying model to all players via the addon became so successful and so widely adopted into common raiding practice that Blizzard began to tighten up their raid encounters to depend even more on players’ ability to manage their threat and aggro levels.

[something about how WoW became about numbers and not role-playing... parallel to D&D's evolution]

The chapter is on how the introduction of a threat meter addon changed my raid group’s practice over time.

Continued from http://markdangerchen.net/2010/01/19/enrollment-of-threat-meter-addon-work-in-progress/

[Need an illustrative, hypothetical table here?]

Looking at Rogues in particular, since I know the game best from their point of view, having played a Rogue during my time with the raid group, I can say that we did not know exactly how much threat each of our abilities generated, but the Rogues did know that certain abilities generated much more threat than others. These were roughly correlated to the damage output of the various abilities. For example, we knew that our main attack, Sinister Strike (SS), generated a consistent, predictable amount of threat that was safe to use, whereas, Eviscerate generated much more threat since generally its damage output was much higher. Yet, the use of Eviscerate was balanced with the fact that we could not use it as often as SS.

<more after break>

Rogues operate on a mechanic of building up or chaining “main” attacks that enable the activation of what are known as “finishing” moves. Sinister Strike is one of these main attacks that can be activated in a sort of rhythmic fashion every three seconds or so [double-check timing of abilities], building up a “combo point” with each successful hit. Rogues can build up to five combo points with these main attacks. Eviscerate is a finishing move that spends or uses up the built-up combo points, and it does more damage with more combo points, giving Rogues an incentive to build up five combo points before using Eviscerate. Thus, Eviscerate is generally used less often than SS, in a more syncopated rhythm, but when it is does get activated, it does more damage.

If we were to graph the damage output of a Rogue using SS and Eviscerate over time, we’d see a baseline level of damage from SS and spikes in the graph every twenty seconds or so from Eviscerate. Since we’ve correlated damage output to threat generation, our threat graph follows a similar pattern with a baseline, consistent threat level that includes spikes in the threat generation activity every twenty seconds or so.

[Insert hypothetical graph here]

These spikes in threat generation were known as danger zones where we needed to be cautious and alert in case the mob aggroed on us. Well, we would have, except for the fact that it was general consensus that for certain fights, especially with boss mobs, we shouldn’t use Eviscerate at all. Instead we used Slice and Dice (SnD), a different finishing move that did not output damage in spike form. Rather, SnD made our non-activated attacks faster.

Every character has a default attack that doesn’t require any input from the player. The level of damage from this default or “white damage” (so called because it is displayed in white in the in-game combat logs) attack from Rogues is determined by the speed of how often a Rogue swings his or her weapons, which is determined by the speed factor or attribute of each weapon [are Rogue's default speed faster? double-check this], multiplied by how much damage the particular weapons could do with each hit. The resulting number is known as the weapons’ damage per second or DPS, a term that has been, as has been mentioned above, co-opted as the name of the role Rogues and other damage dealing classes assume. So, the baseline in the graph above is actually a combination of the white damage plus the consistent damage from SS (a form of “yellow damage,” the color of damage coming from activated abilities in the combat logs).

Slice and Dice temporarily speeds up a Rogue’s default attack frequency, thereby raising the baseline damage by increasing white damage without adding spike yellow damage to the graph.

So, for many boss fights, the Rogues would generally stay away from using Eviscerate and instead use Slice and Dice because we did not want to have spikey damage graphs for fear of having spikey threat graphs, assuming that spikes in threat generation were more likely to pull aggro away from our tanks due to their less predictable nature.

But, again, all this was sort of kept in our heads, and, as a rule, using SnD was not strictly adhered to by all Rogue players. This is especially true while we were learning new boss fights. Often, in order to succeed, we had to push the limits and continuously ride on the edge of too much damage / threat. If we weren’t on the edge of our ability, like an Olympic skier, then we were under performing, which lead to a possible raid wipe if the raid healers were going to run out of mana trying to maintain our current practice. Yet, like all the Olympic skiers who wipe out, which happens quite frequently, we were always in danger of going over the edge or pushing too hard.

The first few times we encountered a new fight, raid wipes were expected. This was to allow for us to learn what mechanics were involved with the new monsters but also to allow for us to test the limits how much damage or threat we could generate. In danger of using a racing reference too heavily, it’s like we’re learning the course or track for the first time and need to adjust our speed if we discover that our first attempts were too fast or too slow.

This is not to say that failure was always welcome, though. Even though early wipes were seen as learning opportunities, it was frustrating to wipe over and over again in the same game session.

Anyway, all this leads up to our fight with the last boss in Molten Core, Ragnaros. When we first encountered him, it was generally agreed upon by the Rogues in the raid that we should stick with using Slice and Dice to maintain a consistent, predictable level of threat.

[quote from Roger here?]

But as we were learning the fight, something completely new changed raiding in World of Warcraft forever.

Contributions to the Scientific Understandings of Sociotechnical Systems

I research the ecology of gaming and new media (Salen, 2008, Stevens, Satwitcz, & McCarthy, 2008). My dissertation focuses on ethnographic accounts of online gaming practice, documenting expertise development, teamwork, and collaboration in a World of Warcraft player group (Chen, 2009). Using actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), this work treats the group as a learning network that successfully enrolled various human and nonhuman resources to thrive in a high-stakes joint-task environment (Taylor, 2009). I find using an analytical lens that recognizes the mangle of gaming (Steinkuehler, 2006, Pickering, 1993) helps to see that distinctions between subject-object or player-game don’t adequately describe in-action learning across settings and time. Rather, a player group’s expertise trajectory is always collaborative and social, always contentious, and always drawing on both micro- and macro-level sociomaterial (Orlikowski, 2007) resources in complex, messy gaming spaces. Analyses of informal learning arrangements using a socio-technical lens are important for science and technology studies, learning sciences, and new media scholars as specific examples of the distributed nature of learning that may lead to a broader conception of everyday practice and learning with new media.

I combine this object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2009) with other interdisciplinary ways of describing learning arrangements including how people position and are positioned into specific roles and relationships (Holland & Leander, 2004) across timescales (Lemke, 2000) in interdiscursive moments (Silverstein, 2007).

I hope to continue using these ideas to describe learning across all of life’s myriad settings (NRC, 2009). As I am just finishing my dissertation this year, I feel like my options are wide open. Possible future areas of study include continued work in online and offline gaming practices in different player communities to expanded sites of study. For example, one research interest I have is to study software and media piracy networks and the learning and expertise development within those networks.

References

• Bogost, I. (2009). What is object-oriented ontology? Retrieved February 25, 2010, from: http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml
• Chen, M. (2009). Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 4(1), 47-73.
• Holland, D., & Leander, K. (2004). Ethnographic studies of positioning and subjectivity: An introduction. Ethos, 32(2), 127–139.
• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290.
• National Research Council. (2009). Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments. P. Bell, B. Lewenstein, A. W. Shouse, & M. A. Feder (Eds.). Board on Science Education, Center for Education, Division of Behavior and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
• Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1435-1448.
• Pickering, A. (1993). The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 559-589.
• Salen, K. (2008). Toward an ecology of gaming. In The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (1–17). USA: The MIT Press.
• Silverstein, M. (2007). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 6-22.
• Steinkuehler, C. A. (2006). The mangle of play. Games and Culture, 1(3), 199-213.
• 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). USA: The MIT Press.
• Taylor, T. L. (2009). The assemblage of play. Games and Culture, 4(4). 331-339.

The Enrollment of a New Actor and the Redistribution of Responsibilities in a World of Warcraft Raid Group

In World of Warcraft, each individual actor in a raid group is in charge of certain tasks and responsibilities. At one point in the life of the raid group I studied, a new actor was allowed into the group. This newbie rendered new services to the rest of the group. The services rendered were essentially rating the actions of the others in the group—that is, assigning a specified number value to their actions—and then remembering who did what to add up the ratings from each particular player. This newbie, though, didn’t actually care one way or the other if these services were used by the others, but if another decided to use them and have his or her rating displayed, that player had to abide by new rules associated with these new services. The newbie wouldn’t verbally announce others’ rating. Instead, a sign was held up and players had to manually look over to read what their ratings were. In that way, the newbie not only served but also demanded, not only taking on the burdens assigned with this new role but also prescribing new responsibilities on the others. Yet others in the raid group, first slowly then readily, came to adopt the use of these new services into their practice as the services’ benefits became increasingly clear. The group came to consider the new tasks as essential parts of its raiding activity, and players could barely remember a time when the rating-remembering services were not used. The newbie became one of them—not a newbie but a veteran—and the group merrily went on its way. But this veteran wasn’t one of them. In fact, it wasn’t even human. It was a technological device, a program, a construct, an “addon” modification to the game.

(More after the break.)

This paper documents the enrollment of this nonhuman actor and its history within the raid group that I studied. The addon was instrumental in helping the raid group become efficient and successful with many in-game battles. Interestingly, the addon played only a temporary role in the raid group’s assessment of a specific encounter, the last monster, Ragnaros, in a fiery cave system known as Molten Core. It helped the group by testing and ruling out a possible diagnosis of the problems with the group’s strategy. After eliminating that possibility, its use was no longer necessary, since its original intended role never needed to be filled in the fight against Ragnaros.

This paper helps us see that, within a learning space or network, people and their material resources collectively share responsibilities, and the distribution of these roles and responsibilities change over time as new challenges are met and as new actors enter the network. This is a story, in other words, of how a network is disrupted by unexpected events and the redistribution work done by the network’s dynamic, adaptable actors to overcome those events.

Roles, responsibilities, and aggro

Each character in WoW fits into an archetypal role based off of historical precedent in the fantasy role-playing game and MMOG genres. In representation, characters are warriors, mages, priests, etc., but for the purposes of the underlying game mechanics, these various hero classes can be roughly categorized into a function-based triumvirate consisting of “tank,” “healer,” and “DPS.” Each of these categories has specific duties and responsibilities to carry in a raid battle. Tanks, with their plentiful health points and massive armor, must keep the monsters occupied and focused on them while healers continually spend mana or magic points, casting spells to make sure the tanks stay alive. DPS (shorthand for damage per second, a way of valuing damage dealers) can then go about actually killing the monsters.

Each category of roles in the triumvirate is therefore necessary to be filled for a raid group to be successful. Without tanks, the healers cannot possibly cast spells fast enough to keep whoever is being attacked alive, and the monsters will kill everyone rather quickly. Without healers, the tanks will die, and the monsters will, again, chain-kill everyone. Without DPS, the healers will eventually run out of mana, the tanks will die, and the monsters will ultimately kill everyone.

The problem is that a monster generally attacks whomever it deems is the most threatening to their survival. If a DPS hits a monster particularly hard or a healer heals too effectively, the monster may take notice and decide to hit back. Whoever has the monster’s attention is said to have “aggro,” and the monster switches targets when players “steal aggro” from others. Tanks can try to prevent this by activating various abilities meant to maintain aggro, while the DPS and healers try to keep their performance at an even, consistent, predictable level without spikes that would make the monster take notice. In other words, many of the encounters in WoW, and indeed most MMOGs, are a balancing game where the three roles of the triumvirate work to maximize their efficiency while keeping the tanks the focus of the monsters attention. The fights, therefore, are engineered by the game developers to test and destabilize the triumvirate.

So, each role in the triumvirate (tank, healer, DPS) has specific responsibilities in a fight. Yet healers and DPS cannot “go nuts” with their abilities, “spamming” their most powerful ability over and over again. Rather, they are constrained by the need to make sure the tanks maintained aggro.

Threat management

These games must obey some sort of algorithm, and, in this case, the way in which a monster decides who to attack is completely reactionary to the actions of the raid members. The underlying “brain” of the game creates a table that includes a row for each raid member, and in each row is a number that starts off at zero and increases a certain amount every time that particular raider activates an ability. The amount depends on the ability. This number is called the threat level. One of the jobs of the raiders, then, is to make sure that the tank(s)’ threat level is higher than everyone else’s.

When the raid group I was part of first started, we each had to internalize our threat level and play it by ear, so to speak. There was no common resource or explicit knowledge of specific numbers associated with specific abilities. We knew from experience that some abilities generated more threat than others, and we had to weigh their costs against the benefits of the abilities. Very often, when a player died, it was because he or she stole aggro from the tank(s). That is, he or she misjudged how much threat was being generated and accidentally raised his or her threat to a higher level than the tank(s)’ threat level. If this happened enough times during an encounter, it usually ended up as a raid “wipe,” where everyone in the raid group died.

• Yay! Sarah Walter and my abstract was accepted to the Association of Internet Researchers conference (IR10, Milwaukie, October 7-11). Here’s what we submitted:

A Comparison of Collaboration across Two Game Contexts: Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft

To better understand the nature of virtual collaboration, we present analyses of high-stakes team activities, known as “raids,” in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). These situations are hotbeds of collaboration, which is increasingly recognized as a valuable twenty-first century skill (Karoly & Panis, 2004). Raids usually involve a great amount of communication and coordination of actions, interdependence of teammates, leadership, and execution of strategy, similar to elements of collaboration in other settings, such as business (Reeves, Malone & O’Driscoll, 2008), surgical teams (Edmondson, 2003), the military (Salas, Bower & Cannon-Bowers, 1995), control room teams (Patrick, et. al., 2006), sports teams (Eccles & Tenenbaum, 2004), and educational settings (Mercier, Goldman & Booker, 2006). These raid events often span hours at a time and are often repeated over several months before the raid zone is cleared, i.e. when the team is able to successfully defeat all of the enemies. Existing studies of learning in MMOGs include gaming as a constellation of literacy practices (Steinkuehler, 2007, 2008), scientific argumentation in web forums around game strategies (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008), and learning game ethos, strategy, and fact-finding with peers via chat (Nardi, 2007). Yet other research has looked at the development of social skills (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2005) and the build-up and leveraging of social and cultural capital to succeed in game activities (Jakobsson & Taylor, 2003, Malaby, 2006). Previous work on raiding has included a focus on providing an ethnographic account of in-game activity and the realignment work needed after moments of failure (Chen, 2009). Without cross-setting comparisons, however, it is difficult to uncover which aspects of gaming are specific to the game world and which can be thought of as enduring qualities of expert collaborative group practice.

To make cross-setting comparisons, we analyze gameplay video, audio conversations, and text chat data from two popular MMOGs, The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and World of Warcraft (WoW). Using a participant-observation approach, we examine two semi-stable teams of players who spent several weeks learning to be successful in a raid. In particular, we examine collaborative behavior and communication for two raid battles in each game: one successful battle, and one unsuccessful. The four cases were coded based on adaptations to work team behavior frameworks (Rousseau, et al., 2006), situation awareness measures (Patrick, et al., 2006), and a coding system used in examining differences between problem-solving youth groups (Baron, 2003). Informed by theories on the relational networks of human and nonhuman actors (Latour, 1988, 2005), which includes considering the distribution of cognitive work within ecological settings (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b), and the assemblage of such systems as applied to games (Taylor, forthcoming), our analyses focus on one aspect of practice, the communication of expert players. This communication includes voice and text chat, and the patterns that emerge when looking across game sessions. By comparing two games with different designs (e.g. team size, player abilities, and scripting of battles) and cultures (e.g. roles, expectations, preferred mode of communication, and use of external tools), we can discover what is common about these collaborative activities, giving us an insight into what is common about teamwork and collaboration in virtual tasks that require a high degree of technical skill and coordinated effort. Themes emerge concerning situational awareness, psychological safety (Edmonson, 1999, 2003), problem solving (Barron, 2003; Roschelle, 1992), and critical communicative practices necessary for success. Results are discussed in relation to collaboration research in other non-virtual settings.

• Yay! Submitted something to the Digital Games Research Association conference (DiGRA, London, September 1-4). I’ll hear on June 1 whether it is accepted. I can’t post what I submitted yet… Blind review and all…
• Yay! I’m in a reading group this quarter that focuses on actor-network theory and activity theory. Right now we’re reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social. Read the above abstract to get a really, really brief summary, though I realize it isn’t written for non-academics…
• Yay! I’m taking Isaac Gottesman‘s Educators as Intellectuals class (again, but this one is different than the one two years ago). We are reading biographical, philosophical, and ethnographic accounts of what it means to be an intellectual/activist/educator and writing our own historical, situated accounts… There’s some crazy connections being made between this and the sociotechnical stuff I’ve been reading… Gross, for example, argues that Rorty was shaped by his relationships with others and that social and cultural capital played a huge part in his development, more so than any inherent agentive trait. Here’s the full list of what we’re reading:
  • Said. Representations of the Intellectuals
  • Gross. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher
  • Ransby. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
  • Ayers. To Teach
  • Pascoe. Dude, You’re a Fag
• Yay! I’m going on the Microsoft, EA, and GarageGames sponsored Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference next week, which takes place on the Disney cruise ship, sailing the Bahamas. :) Cabining with Roger Altizer! We’re going to hit up Disney World first. Hopefully, while he screams like a little school girl, I’ll just be giggling (like a little school girl).
• Boo! Robin is sick this week. I was sick for like a day, but her’s is lasting a week so far…
• Boo! Ushki also got sick this week. She was constipated something fierce.
• Boo! Our water heater exploded on Thursday. Apparently, it’s a power vent heater, costing about $1000 more than a regular water heater ($1500). But, on top of that, the contractors who built our townhouse cut some corners and did some really strange things with their install of the water heater, snuggling it in a really tight space in the garage that is too small for modern water heaters. Furthermore, our heating system uses the hot water system, complicating matters a little, as the dudes from Fast Water Heater Co. install a new water heater in a new space. We originally got a quote from O’Neill Plumbing that seemed high, but I was at the office and Robin was stuffy headed so we didn’t quite understand the complexity of the situation. When we got a second quote from the Home Depot referred Fast Water Heater Co., the prices were actually about the same: $2700!! Boo, indeed. We went with Fast since Jason took the time to explain the situation very carefully (three times! me, Robin, my mom).
• Yay (and Boo)! I’m going to go to State of Play (SoP, NYC, June 18-20), and Dan Hunter, the guy organizing it (and fellow guildie) is offering graduate students free conference registration and either free room and board or some money for airfare! There was talk about folks who were going to be at Games Learning Society (GLS, Madison, June 12-14) carpooling over to NYC. That sounded like fun but I’m having problems getting a confirmation that that is actually happening. Given that I now need to pay for this new water heater somehow, I fear I might be skipping GLS this year… :( If I get into DiGRA, I hope Phil remembers his conversation with me about getting LIFE to pay for it…

Also:

• I’m ramping up video analysis of a specific kid and his video game practices for ESTG’s ethnographic study.
• I’m an officer for Educators for Social Justice (ESJ) this year, and this quarter we’re organizing a panel on teacher education and social justice issues.
• I’m helping the Associated Students of the College of Ed (ASCE) set up a website next week.
• The IT Crowd is pretty good.
• The Red Dwarf final episodes finally were aired. Odd Blade Runner references. I think the third part (of three) fell flat.
• I just finished playing Drakensang. Very linear. No narrative decision points to speak of. Very detailed combat system. German. Felt kind of like Drakensang : The Witcher = Icewind Dale : Baldur’s Gate (or maybe even Planescape).

A flurry of activity occurred commenting about the use of ANT. It’s not a method but a framework, for example.

I was excited because I am thinking of using ANT to look at WoW raiding practice, and since I wanted to get feedback, too, I posted the following:

Hey all!

Fascinating discussion.

I’ve recently starting reading about ANT and have been toying with the idea of analyzing how a raid in WoW works through an ANT lens, though I am unsure what it’ll get me more than using distributed cognition (Hutchins) or just simply describing the learning arrangement between various humans and nonhumans to get the job done.

I guess my problem with ANT is that it seems boundless in terms of macro vs. micro analysis. As has been mentioned, an actor network can be made up of actor networks. Where does one start?

So, for example, I have a 40 person raid group that learns to kill a boss over several weeks. It seems like each person should be considered an actor that had to be translated into the network. We’ve also collectively used certain addons and tools within the game to help us manage cognitive load and to make transparent some of the underworkings of the game. Does each of these addons get counted? Does each iteration of an addon get counted (40 people running the same addon in slightly different ways, positioned on the screen differently, paying attention to different parts of the addon, etc.)? Do specific functions of the addon get separated as individual actors? Do different elements of the UI get separated? To back up, do specific people get broken down to mind-body-fingers?

Latour (writing as Johnson) briefly mentions that a door closer, an actor that’s been delegated the task of making a hole back into a wall, can be further broken down into the mechanisms in the whole object (egs. a spring, a metal cylinder). Is it completely arbitrary where a researcher draws the line?

In Reassembling the Social, Latour emphasizes tracing associations, which is possibly an answer to my above questions. I could concentrate on describing practice in the raid activity as I see it (which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for a while now), but pay particular attention to describing the functions of specific things as they relate to other things. Do this as they come up. In turn, these associations lead to other things that come up. Is that no longer considered ANT but after-ANT?

Is it more useful to describe cognition and memory and material resources within an entity a la dcog than use ANT? (Though my prob with dcog is more that it seems like a snapshot-in-time where I am trying to document the change in practice. ANT seems like it inherently considers instability and change through the act of translation.) Is ANT reserved for bigger arguments about societal relationships? About translation being the leveraging or convincing of other actors to share tasks? Or maybe a dcog analysis is the way to use an ANT lens using my ethnographic mehod…

Lots of questions. Maybe better suited to a blog post, as I’m just throwing ideas out there without much experience with ANT and such… But I thought I’d throw them out since it seems to that me the fastest way to learn something is to make transparent what you don’t know. And my digital ears perked up when I saw Tamara’s first message in this thread. ANT and MMOGs!

thanks,
mark

NO ONE replied except Bonnie Nardi off list! :(

And even then, she gave me some good pointers to articles I should read without any editorial comments of her own. Gah, more reading! :p

Was it not clear enough? I don’t explain distributed cognition at all. I don’t explain ANT at all because I assume the people who were talking about it know more about it than I do. I don’t explain WoW raiding, either, but I thought they’d all know what I was talking about. Also, I didn’t want to make the email even longer than it was…

Ah well… I guess I’ll keep reading.

There are six SLCs:

1. Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science, and Technology (CELEST) – most brainy
   
2. Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) – most “everything is about life, dude”
   
3. Pittsburg Science of Learning Center (PSLC) – most original name
4. Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) – most visual
5. Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) – quickest, yet slowest
6. Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) – most spatial

This past weekend the UW branch of LIFE (which also has branches at Stanford and SRI) hosted the second annual grad student and post-docs inter-center conference. It was pretty cool meeting all these other learning sciences students and hearing about their research. We were able to share tools and resources, findings, methods, theories and ideas, and some good drink and company at local bars after each day’s events.

There were a number of us interested in games for learning, from the use of virtual environments for studying the effects of 1st person vs. 3rd person POV on learning (Robb) to testing social vs. non-social feedback for navigation tasks (Dylan Arena), from task oriented vs. social oriented cultural learning goals (Amy) to collaborative activity-based multiplayer mouse control (Neema).

The first day, Sarah Walter from Stanford arrived early so we could meet and brainstorm proposals for upcoming conferences. She does almost the same research as me except that:

• I am focusing on trying to map the way a raid group works to an ANT or distributed cognition model where she’s focusing more on specific collaboration practices.
• My data only includes what players were already doing (chat logs, video, web forum threads), while Sarah’s got some interview and survey data in addition to what I’ve done.
• I’m looking at a 40-person raid in World of Warcraft, while Sarah’s group is a 12-person raid in Lord of the Rings Online.

We quickly saw that it would be easy to start using the same coding scheme and collaborate on analyses so we could compare our settings and findings. We’re writing abstracts to submit to IR10 (Milwaukie, Oct) and DiGRA (London, Sept). Prob will also submit to GLS (Madison, June 10-12) but she’s going to be at CSCL in Greece (lucky!) at the same time as GLS.

On Friday, we had a full day of poster sessions and then workshops on inter and intra center collaboration. We need a match.com for researchers, one that pushes info to participants when something new of interest (maybe tag based) gets added rather than depending on us to go visit a site routinely. Does that exist?

Afterwards, dinner at Portage Bay Cafe was pretty good. Met Vanessa who researches media realism and its effects on arousal.

On Saturday, we had presentations and workshops on current research and tools. The workshop I went to was the video analysis one and ELAN (presented by Sarah Fish and Naomi Berlove of VL2) looks great!

On Sunday, the conference was technically over, but I spent the day working at a cafe with Sarah Lewis (also from Stanford), lunch with Turadg, Erin, Ruth, and Ido (all from CMU), and working at a different cafe with Turadg. Sarah and I talked a bit about our programs and profs and politics. Very informative. :)

Turadg showed me some cool stuff he’s been working on that might help me with my chart creation… using python and pickling and a make file and such rather than going through all the crazy manual steps I’ve been doing with a text editor, excel, sql, flash, and photoshop. He’s also working on a collective web tool for learning that I’ve agreed to help with (though honestly, I only have a fuzzy image of what it is) and runs the Open Education Research blog.

Anyway, for anyone interested, below is the poster I presented (based off of the paper I was working on last month) at the conference. Also, you can get the bigger PDF version (13 MB).

Visualizing Chat Data in a WoW Player Group