E1n1verse

Back in March 2011, I gave an invited keynote at the JISC Scotland/Consolarium Game To Learn: Take 2 conference in Dundee, Scotland. The abstract read:

All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong.
—Weird Al

My mother told me cleaning toilets builds character if done repeatedly. The other night five friends spent more than three hours dying over and over again while playing World of Warcraft (WoW). She never said anything about dying. I found cleaning toilets only gets you clean toilets. Dying and playing, however, teaches you important things. Demons, dragons, dwarves, and possibly folklore, you could see, but learning, love, and leadership?

Sounds crazy, but it’s true: World of Warcraft has something to say about learning. Prepare yourself, because everything you thought you knew is wrong.

The talk went very well and the slides were available shortly after the talk via SlideShare, but I was somewhat remiss in preparing a version for my blogs. This version was originally posted on my WoW Learning Project site.

You have a choice of formats:

1. The original slides (slightly cleaned up) via SlideShare.
2. The original slides and notes (slightly cleaned up) via SlideShare.
3. A downloadable PDF version of this blog post (from copy at WoWLearning).
4. This blog post.

This post is a written version of the original talk with the more important slide graphics incorporated. It can therefore be read without the original slides. Enjoy! If you have any comments, feel free to leave them.

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Credit: Photo by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

Last month, amidst the busyness and stresses of my life, an important event passed by without fanfare or notice: I published my first open access article in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, a recently relaunched journal co-edited by Martin Weller.

It’s “only” a book review of Kurt Squire’s Video Games and Learning: Teaching Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, but it has a few firsts of its own. It’s the first thing I’ve “formally” published on video games, learning, and community. It’s also the first item published in a traditional academic forum since book reviews and conference papers in 1997/1998. That is a big dry spell, I agree! I’m working on making 2012 the year I turn things around. From small beginnings can come big things, so here’s to more firsts!

Hoyle, M.A. (2012). ‘Book Review: From N00B to Community Organizer: A Review of Kurt Squire’s ‘Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory in the Digital Age’’. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, JIME Special Issue on Open Educational Resources [online]. Available from: http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2012-06 [Accessed April 15, 2012].

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Credit: Photo by Marsha Brockman (whodeenee) under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

Image: Marbles, many marbles. I think I have lost mine in a sample of many marbles.

I’ve been re-running analyses today on my population of survey responses. I decided to remove some more responses to eliminate some the scatteredness in the population. The majority of responses were from European PvE (player versus the environment) realm players, so I removed the four American realm players and then the five non-PvE players, leaving me with a sample of 30.

The more I read about sampling, the more confused I am.

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Credit: Screenshot by Heather Hopkins (Clevergrrl) under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

Image: I can just imagine this Blood Furnace boss exhorting people “L2P!” as he kills them over and over.

It is day two of the writing regime. Today’s plan is writing 750 words, writing CMA feedback, and working on the paper. I was musing last night about the approach to the paper, thinking that having an abstract or an introduction actually makes it easier to write because it provides a focus for the paper’s direction. I have heard other people say that it makes sense to leave the introduction to the last because then you know what you’ve written. I think the former approach might be more sensible for me. I can always go back and revise the introduction if it does not reflect what I end up doing. Focus, however, is priceless.

In addition to an introduction or an abstract, a title might also help. I was experimenting with variants of “L2P! Learn To Play Or…”. I thought that was clever, as it’s something you often see more experienced, impatient players saying to players who they think are not living up to their expectations in terms of expertise or speed. In the context of my work, however, it probably makes more sense to say “P2L! Play To Learn”, but I’m not sure how many people will get that. Nevertheless, a title is a starting point. I had both before I started my keynote writing and that turned out well. Perhaps I can incorporate the factoid into the abstract.

Abstract:

“L2P! L2P!” This is the exhortation you might encounter in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) when other players around you believe your skill or speed in playing is inadequate. It means “learn to play”. In this paper, we demonstrate how L2P has been turned on its axis to yoke the trials of play to the game of learning. 39 World of Warcraft players primarily playing in Europe submitted essays answering the question “Why do you play World of Warcraft?” in a 2010 study.

Using a grounded theory approach and discourse analysis, the essays were analyzed to ascertain the contributors’ motivations for playing and their reasons for persisting in playing. Yee’s player motivational framework subcomponents (Yee 2005; Yee 2006) were applied to each essay and contrasted with Bartle’s original player typology (Bartle 1996; Bartle 2003) in aggregate to determine overall, general motives these players had. While participants were not asked to write explicitly about learning and many did not provide any examples, several contributions are examined here as case studies of mundane and unusual examples, illustrating what these adults are playing to learn–a learning that goes beyond dungeons, dragons, and dwarves.

That does not seem too bad as a first go. I need to check on the discourse analysis; it might not be completely true. I also have no idea how I am going to write up the grounded theory bit appropriately, but at least that is accurate. I definitely followed that kind of approach in tagging the essays. I need to find some time to pore through the James Paul Gee’s book on discourse analysis. I just saw someone else in #phdchat mention it again yesterday. It keeps cropping up and I keep not reading it, even after I went to buy it and then realized I already had. That is trying to tell me something, if I would only listen. I also need to check on what to call Yee’s framework.

References:

Bartle, R. (1996) ‘Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs’, Journal of MUD Research, 1 (1). Also available from: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (Accessed April 22, 2011).

Bartle, R. (2003) Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Publishing.

Yee, N. (2005) A Model of Player Motivations, [online] Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=1 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Yee, N. (2006) ‘Motivations for Play in Online Games’, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9 (6), pp:772-775. Also available from: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

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Elsheindra the Druid

I have been reading slowly but surely through James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Learning and Literacy over the last six months. The following is based on notes I took for my research journal while reading Chapter 3 on learning and identity. In particular, I focus on the notion of the tripartite identity and what that means to me in the real world and in the virtual world in which I play.

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As part of a course under development at The Open University, I was approached as a known World of Warcraft player and asked to write a short paragraph or two on why I play World of Warcraft. I freely admit to failing to only write a short paragraph or two, but that’s probably because I’m passionate about World of Warcraft and my activities in it, especially given the prominence it plays in my life in so many areas. Read on to find out why I play World of Warcraft.

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I have my annual Ph.D. review meeting tomorrow afternoon. As usual, I’m more than a bit nervous, especially as I made the big step this academic year of completely dropping my former Ph.D. work and starting a brand new topic that intersects the boundaries of my three main interests: communities, learning and teaching, and Internet-enabled technologies. As part of the review process, we’re asked to produce a 4-page report that explains what we’ve done since the last report. In your first year, this report ought to focus on your thesis proposal, although many students won’t yet have one. I do have some ideas about what I want to do and how I am going to go about it. I’ve made an online version so that it will be indexed and easily findable by others interested in World of Warcraft and e-learning.

The 30-second summary: Examine how metaphors and game design of World of Warcraft motivate people to learn and to work, with an eye to transferring motivation, social knowledge building, and persistence to online higher education practices, like community building for lifelong learning.

Click the “More” link below to continue reading the online version of the proposal and progress report. A downloadable PDF version is also available.

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For the last several months, I’ve been engaged in various activities all with the same intended goal: generate a concrete idea about what specifically I want to look at in Michelle 2.0, my new Ph.D. I’ve been mind mapping, writing permutation programs, brainstorming, discussing, writing essays, and writing thesis proposal plans. The most successful thing was probably having to sum up what I’m doing briefly for a visitor to the research lab’s weekly meeting this morning. While it answers the Twitter question “What are you doing?”, it’s too long to fit in 140 characters but it does fit into 40 words.

Q: What are you doing?

A: Looking at how metaphors and game design of World of Warcraft motivate people to learn and to work, with an eye to transferring motivation, social knowledge building, and persistence to online distance education practices, like teaching and community building.

There you go. Now we all know!

I’d just like to point out, though, that my ability to verbalize it so coherently and concisely is a result of all the other writing and thinking I’ve been doing. If I hadn’t written the essay in November and the extremely rough paper outline for a thesis proposal on Sunday, the idea would not have coalesced so concretely. Time, background cogitation and serendipity seem to be strong features of my new Ph.D. For me, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, has been sharply focussed by talking, reading, writing, and going to seminars. It doesn’t matter what the seminars were or how relevant. It’s amazing how much I’ve drawn out of the motivational reading group I was participating in when I didn’t even know I was interested in motivation. Connections appear where you least expect them. The important thing is to take the leap and do.

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