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.

Role playing games involve three identities: you, the real-world person, who is playing a role-played character; the role-played character, a virtual identity played by you; and a projective identity, the interface between you and the virtual identity, where you project your values onto the virtual character and see the virtual character as a personal project under your control. This is Gee’s notion of the tripartite identity. Gee differentiates between these by emphasizing different parts of the phrase “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead”. “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead” is the real-world Gee. “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead” is the virtual world character. Finally, “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead” is the projective identity.

The projective identity involves meta-reflection. You consider what kind of “person” you want your role-played character to be. Gee (2007, p. 51) comments that “A good role-playing video game makes me think new thoughts about what I value and what I do not.” The virtual character’s history and future is all part of the projective identity. “[you] feel responsible to and for the character.” (p. 53)

“When you have chosen a video game well, the virtual world it allows you to live in is quite compelling.” (Gee 2007, p. 59) Gee asserts that if the virtual world and the player’s virtual identity are not compelling then little deep learning will occur, because the player is not invested in mastering the domain. That is, they see little point or reward to investing effort, time, or practice required for domain mastery. What makes the realm compelling varies from player to player and even at different times. I know from my own experience that I initially was enthralled by the amazing and expansive world created in World of Warcraft. These days, however, I am interested in teamwork and achieving goals, so I spend very little time admiring the fantastic scenery or engaging in exploration.

High stone pillar adjacent to the Druid's Temple near Ilton

If the virtual identity and world map onto your real world identity and experiences, that also helps make a game compelling. As an educator who specializes in online distance education, part of my key real-world identity is community builder. One of the first things I did in World of Warcraft was create a guild and start building a community. I later expanded on that by helping form and run an alliance of social guilds, an even larger community. People and the ability to help people was a strong compelling factor that the game afforded me, bridging my real-world and virtual identities.

It is clear how the game itself was able to map onto my real-world skills and identity, but it is probably not so obvious how that is woven into my virtual identity. My first character, which I still primarily use, was Elsheindra, a night elf druid. As Michelle, I am keenly interested in helping people, which is why I enjoy teaching so much. As Elsheindra, I could be a restoration druid, a healer. Not only does this enable me to help people by healing them or making them stronger, it ties into my original desire to be a doctor. As Michelle who grew up in Canada and spent a lot of time hiking and camping, I have a deep love for trees and green, something I think is epitomized by the druid class, as druids in the game lore are keepers of the world and masters of nature, similar to Celtic associations. As a result, Elsheindra, for many years, did not kill things. Partially because healing druids were really poor at it, but also because I didn’t think it was appropriate for a healer to be gratuitously taking lives when she is supposed to be devoted to saving them. That was not who I wanted Elsheindra to be, a clear example Gee’s projective identity.

References:

• Gee, J.P. (2007) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, 2nd edition, New York, NY, United States, Palgrave Macmillan.

Images:

• Elsheindra the Druid ©Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
• Druid Temple ©Phil Catterall licensed for reuse under CC-BY-SA.

In the actual experiment, I gave Basil the following three essays:

Essay 1:
At first it was a way of keeping in touch with friends after I’d moved away. But I made more new friends throughthe online gaming community that occurs around the game. I’ve met a good number of my fellow guild members, including my guild leader and most of the other officers. To me, game has always been about exploring, storylines and the exotic locales presented therein. That’s all secondary to killing bosses, and trudging through raids really.

Essay 2:
I play WoW and other MMORPGS for the simple reason that I’m intrigued by the online community and game play aspects. WoW is my particular favourite that I return to again and again. I believe the reasoning behind this is the friendly community that has matured to quite a size over the number of years I’ve been playing. In addition to the community I find the story lines within the game interesting, challenging and sometimes, dare I say it, exciting. By exciting I mean, that like a good book, you want to see what is going to happen next!

Originally I started playing WoW for the simply reason it was an MMORPG. I was intrigued by the genre and WoW was really one of the first to be highlighted through the media, etc. As I progressed in the game, I discovered that it was a great way to relax after a busy day. As a form of escapism, it helped with relieving stress.

Now I rarely get to play WoW or any other MMORPG for that matter, however, for the same reasons of relaxation, online community, exciting stories, I still try to play as regularly as I can.

Essay 3:
Originally I moved to WoW simply because the majority of my guild had moved from DAoC, when WoW was released it was the next game that the existing guild members were collecting in. Ironically even though I followed my guild to the game I am actually motivated by the personal achievement.

I am the kind of player that likes to explore every location, complete every quest before moving on to the next zone and maximise trade skills. With each expansion, I spent most of the time solo’ing to the level cap, then exploring group content with my guild or raiding alliance.

With access to the raiding alliance I get to try challenging content which often require a level of skill and co-ordination. Currently I am motivated with the challenges of raiding with the aim to have completed as much as possible before the next content patch.

I know there is a sigma [sic] attached with gamers, but when you consider some people will return from work and just sit passively in front of a TV for 5hours. Similarly you see people sit all night on online chat channels. Given how some spend their time, how can spending your time problem solving and socialising with others with similar interests be so wrong.

Basil was asked to summarize the main ideas that occurred in each essay. Unfortunately, he was somewhat influenced by the question and noted down what people said their initial impetus for playing World of Warcraft was and then why they continue to play. I had to send him off to do it again. Table 1 illustrates our responses.

When I looked at essay 1, there was a bit of a question about things being “secondary to killing bosses , and trudging through raids…” Secondary implies that the other things were of lesser importance, but the negative tone implicit with words like “trudging” would seem to bely that, so I didn’t include the raiding. In talking to Basil, I know he had the same problem, because he asked me about it and I told him I would not give him an answer. As a result, he included raiding, whereas I did not.

On the whole, we don’t seem that different. If we had gone through the essays in advance together and agreed on some themes, I suspect the coding would have been similar. What do you think?

WoW Learning Project Questions PDF image

Downloadable Resources:

• WoW Learning Research Project A4 poster (230 KB PDF)

The One and Friends at the start of Razorgore encounter in Blackwing Lair in March of 2010

I’m now in week two of my first survey into learning, communities of practice, and World of Warcraft in support of my doctorate. The first part of the survey is collecting some in-game demographic details, such as how long people have played, what their first character was, favourite professions, etc. The meat of the survey, however, is a short answer question about why people play World of Warcraft.

I am still looking for additional responses and the survey is scheduled to close at the end of this weekend (April 18th). If you play World of Warcraft or know other players, I would be grateful if you could encourage them to visit the survey information page and participate. On completion, participants will be given a code to enter a draw for three Blizzard store pets as prizes.

Tweet, ask in guild, ask at university, or poke your workmates to pass the word along. Just remember that it’s only open to those 18 years or older as I’m interested in examining adults and learning and there are restrictions on participation in things by those younger than 18.

Thanks!

• Survey 1: Why Do You Play World of Warcraft

1. 60% of MMORPGs players are in the 20-35 year-old demographic (Nick Yee in Escoriaza 2009).
2. In World of Warcraft specifically, 47% of players in 2005 were 26 years or older. (Yee 2008).
3. About 75% of new students to The Open University are 26 years or older (Jha 2010, p. 20).

When you consider that World of Warcraft had more than 11.5 million active subscribers by the end of 2008 (Blandeburgo 2009), that’s more than 5.4 million people in an age group very interesting for my work in higher education via distance education. In particular, remember that these 5.4 million people are often very compelled (sometimes even addicted) to play. What is it that motivates these people and what real-life tangible learning benefits are derived?

Those are questions that I intend to answer in the WoW Learning project, a study of learning in World of Warcraft. Quietly built earlier this month and located at the memorable WoWLearning.org, it will be a repository for data, posts, and papers about my Ph.D. research into the learning, motivation, and communities of practice formation demonstrated by World of Warcraft players, both in the game and on forums.

As the project will include ethnographic work in World of Warcraft as well as surveys, in the interests of transparency and to help foster credibility, postings are made using my World of Warcraft character name “Elsheindra (Michelle)” instead of my full real name or commonly used Internet nickname of “Eingang.”

References

• Blandeburgo, B. (2009) ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed March 30, 2010).
• Escoriaza, J.C.P. (2009) Second Skin. [MPEG 4 Film]. United States: Liberation Ent.
• Jha, J. (2010) ‘Harnessing Technology To Open Up Learning for All: Interview Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor, Open University, UK’, Global: The International Briefing, 2 (March 2010), pp:18-21. Also available from: http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/d118c039 (Accessed March 30, 2010).
• Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed February 21, 2010).

I know people are very curious about the results of my recent E-Mail in the Cloud: An Open University Survey. Time is a bit short for me, so I decided to write up this quick and dirty post outlining the key result. An analysis of the comments people left about why they made the choice they did will be covered in a later posting, as those comments proved to be extremely interesting.

In a more formal report, the order of detail presented would be different. I’ve started with the results first, as that’s likely to be of interest to most people, and then discussed the methodology, survey deployment, and motivation.

Table of Contents

• The Respondents
• Key Findings
• The Specifics
• Caveats
• Motivation
• Methodology
• Conclusions

The Respondents

533 people participated in the week-long survey. This is broken down visually in Figure 1. Of those:

• 71.1% declared themselves as students (379 people)
• 22.5% declared themselves as associate lecturers, academic conference moderators, or script markers (120 people)
• 3.4% declared themselves as permanent members of staff, either academic or support (18 people).
• 3.0% chose the “other” category (16 people).

Figure 1: Graph representing numbers and percentages of respondents, broken down by role

Of the 16 others, 7 were alumni. 3 others should probably have been in the AL category but politically considered themselves permanent members of staff. 3 were combinations of ALs/students, 1 was an AL/external contractor, 1 was a student but hoping to become an AL, and 1 claimed to belong to all three categories.

In this quick and dirty analysis, I have not assigned the “others” to appropriate existing categories, so their input is being omitted for the moment. I’ll leave that for a subsequent post.

Key Findings

1. Microsoft Live@edu is the preferred choice of very few people overall (11.63%)
2. A large number of people don’t know enough to make a choice between the two (36.21%)
3. An even larger number of all surveyed respondents (43.52%) would choose Google Apps Eduction Edition.
4. If a choice had to be made, Google Apps Education Edition was the most preferred by at least 40% of the respondents of a given role, with the exception of the 16 “Other” respondents.
5. If the “don’t care either way” respondents (46) are considered, Google Apps Education Edition would be the choice of 50.28% of all respondents and Microsoft Live@edu 20.26%.
6. If Microsoft Live@edu was chosen, it was by a student, far above any other respondent role (14.78% vs the next closest of 6.25%).

The Specifics

The following data table and graphic illustrates the specific choices of different respondents by role. If you’re examining Table 1 visually, bolded cells indicate that the majority of respondents in that row choose that option. For example, in the first row, which is Google Apps Education Edition, the cells for students, permanent staff, and response totals are all bolded, indicating those groups preferred Google Apps Education Edition over the other choices available.

Figure 2: Graph representing the preferences for a system by role.

Figure 2 shows a cylinder for each role in the survey. Each cylinder shows the percentage of respondents who chose Google Apps Education Edition, Microsoft Live@edu, don’t care either way, and don’t really know enough to make a choice with different colours. Google is red, Microsoft is blue, don’t know is yellow, and don’t care is green. While specific numbers aren’t shown on this graph, the total number of respondents in that category is indicated at the bottom, so you can either consult Table 1 for the number of respondents or do a quick calculation yourself.

Caveats

This was an unofficial survey that was designed and released on very short notice. Although I made a good effort to advertise it widely, the number of respondents is relatively low when compared with the Open University’s population of associate lecturers, permanent staff, and students.

While I specifically advertised in places where I knew Open University community members would see the information, I cannot guarantee that everyone who responded was associated with the Open University. I cannot see a reason why external people would participate, but I cannot preclude the possibility.

SurveyMonkey attempts to prevent the same person from completing the survey multiple times. However, that is based on the respondents’ IP addresses. Therefore, if a respondent changed location or has changing dynamically assigned IP addresses, it is possible they could have completed the survey more than once. This could have been avoided by collecting unique Open University identification information for each participant, but that would also have meant needing more stringent data handling and an increased reluctance to participate.

The rest of this post takes a step backwards and considers motivation, deployment, and survey design.

Motivation

According to David Wilson, director of strategic planning in LTS, a choice is being considered between Google Apps Education Edition and Microsoft Live@edu and should be made shortly (in Snowball 36 – November 2009). Students are definitely migrating. A decision is still being made about what to do with e-mail addresses for associate lecturers.

I thought it would be useful to survey interested parties about their preference if they had to choose between the two systems. I was especially interested in obtaining some indication of preference from students, who are guaranteed to be affected. The Business Steering Group, the group responsible for making the decision, will be meeting again soon and I will forward the findings of the survey to them for consideration.

Methodology

The survey itself was very simple, consisting of only three questions:

1. Which one of the following roles best describes your main role at the Open University? Your main role will be where you spend the majority of your time or where moving your existing FirstClass e-mail to the cloud will have the most impact.
2. Which cloud-based system would you prefer, if you had to choose one or the other? Choices are randomised.
3. I confirm that I am associated with the Open University as a student, associate lecturer, permanent staff, or in some other capacity.

The first question was intended to categorize the different respondents by their role at the university. It was recognized that some people have more than one role. They were asked to choose the one where the change would have the most impact. The role was then used to organize the results of the second question.

The second question is the heart of the survey. Respondents were give four choices:

• Google Apps Education Edition
• Microsoft Live@edu
• Don’t care either way
• Don’t really know enough to make a choice

The choices were randomized to avoid any suggestion of bias on the part of the survey giver.

There was also an opportunity to add some brief free-form comments on their choice. From comments in this section and comments received by e-mail, I know many people wanted the ability to say “Neither”. That was not a realistic choice given that one of the two systems will be adopted. That is also why it is worded as “if you had to choose…”

The third question was where the respondent agrees that they are associated with The Open University in some way. The survey is not very useful if it is completed by parties not affected by the outcome.

The survey was prefaced with some brief information about the motivation for the survey and how the survey results would be used. Respondents were also given two links from Google and two links from Microsoft on their respective products. Respondents were also given links to two articles from independent bloggers or education organizations reviewing the two products.

Respondents were assured that the survey was unofficial and no personal details, including computer IP addresses, were being recorded or stored with the survey. They were also assured that I would only be using the data for providing indicative preferences to the Open University and I had not sought or received permission from the Open University to conduct the survey. Contact details by e-mail or Twitter were included.

Survey Deployment

The survey questions were presented and answered electronically via the cloud-based SurveyMonkey poll service. The survey was open between Sunday, November 22nd, and Sunday, November 29th (23:59). Respondents were initially directed to the survey by one of three methods:

• A microblog entry on Twitter with a shortened URL leading to a blog post with a bit more background information on the survey and slightly expanded commentary on the survey than in the actual survey itself. I made several postings throughout the survey period, each time asking others to also pass the information on, which several people did.
• Postings in several FirstClass conferences consisting of a little background information about why I was doing the survey, how it would be used, and how to contact me. The posting included the URL for the a blog post as well as a direct link to the SurveyMonkey survey. The message asked readers to pass the message along to other interested parties, which resulted in it being posted to an unknown number of OUSA and course conferences. I personally made postings in the following FirstClass conferences:
  • MCT AL Discussion Forum
  • AL Common Room
  • Technology Cafe
  • Science Chat
  • Social sciences Cafe
  • R01 Arts Cafe
  • R03 Arts Cafe
  • OUSA Mac General
  • OUSA Open Access
  • OUSA Office Applications
  • OUSA Linux
  • OUSA London
  • OUSA Chat
  • OUSA Moderators
• A posting was made in the “Lounge” section of Platform, the Open University Community site. The posting was made the 25th of November and Platform claims “0 views”, but that seems to be an error as all threads have 0 views even when they have responses.

Conclusions

Even considering the various caveats in place, I think it is clear there is a strong preference for Google Apps Education Edition if people have to choose between one or the other. Examining the free-form comments, I know there is a belief from many people that e-mail should be kept in-house or that a choice of “none of the above” would have been preferred. Many people are concerned about keeping .open.ac.uk addresses for academic hardware and software purchases. Many people also expressed concern about security and data privacy issues with their e-mail being managed by either Google or Microsoft. I’ll examine these in more detail in a follow-up report.

Thank you to all those who took the time to respond and comment. I would also like to thank those people who reposted or re-tweeted the survey information. As promised, I will be passing this information along shortly to the Business Steering Group who is making the decision.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave a comment here, message me as @Eingang on Twitter, or e-mail me as mah383 on FirstClass server 2 (tutor.open.ac.uk).

Tweet This!

Windows Live Mail mailbox in Redmond, WA

I joined the Open University (OU) as an Associate Lecturer (AL) back in May 2000 to teach the university’s T171: You, Your Computer and the Net course, the university’s first large-scale foray into online teaching. As one of hundreds of new ALs, I was thrown into the world of FirstClass, the university’s chosen platform for collaboration and discussion in its courses, and among its students and associate lecturers. If you haven’t already heard, the death knell for FirstClass has been sounded. I believe the transition away from FirstClass for courses is expected to be complete by October 2010. As part of that transition, our e-mail accounts need to go somewhere, but where?

Sample Google Mail Spam Folder

Both of the cloud offerings offer considerably more functionality than just e-mail. Google Mail’s been joined by Google Docs, instant messaging, and calendars. Microsoft’s HotMail has been combined with Outlook Live, a remote file locker, calendaring, instant messaging, and Microsoft Office workspace to share documents. If you’re not familiar with some of these systems, here are some resources:

• Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Mail About

• Microsoft Live@edu
• Microsoft Live@edu’s Outlook Live/Hotmail Live E-mail Service Features
• Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps” (March 2008)
• Google Apps for Education vs Microsoft’s Live@edu
  (3-part blog series): Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Thanks, Lynn, for Part 3 pointer).

The survey is open to any Open University community member, whether staff, consultant, or student. The survey will run between November 22nd and November 29th. I’ve specifically asked in the survey about your role, because I recognise that different university community members will have different needs. The survey results, broken down by role, will be forwarded onto the senior decision-making committee. I can’t guarantee how much attention they’ll pay, but the more of us who participate, the stronger the impact our voice and preferences will have.

You may feel you don’t know enough to make a choice between the two systems on offer. That’s OK, too. There’s a choice in the survey to indicate that or even that you don’t care either way.

No personal details, not even your IP address, will be collected and stored with the survey. It’s completely anonymous. It’s also unofficial. I’m doing this because I think we should have some sort of say and I’m motivated to provide a mechanism, however imperfect, to provide at least an indication of our preferences as a community. Comments or questions can be directed to me on this blog entry or via @Eingang on Twitter.

You’ll find the survey at the short URL of http://tr.im/OUinCloud. I hope you’ll participate. Feel free to point people at this blog entry, re-tweet the survey or blog address, or otherwise let as many of your fellow students and OU associates know about the survey. We only have a week and more participation is better, so let’s make it count!

Thanks!
Michelle A. Hoyle,
Open University Associate Lecturer and postgraduate student

Shortcuts:

• The survey: http://tr.im/OUinCloud or http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=IztCuXuYgqMj_2bVFGct_2f8Qg_3d_3d if the tr.im URL isn’t working.
• This entry: http://tr.im/OUCloudBlog

Images:

• Windows Live Mailbox:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/timheuer/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
• Google Mail Spam Folder: Michelle A. Hoyle

However, the music industry has been forced to change. The talent was still scarce, but production and distribution were now abundant. As we know, artists can even easily self-publish and promote, taking that power out of the record industry’s grasping hands. Educational resources are now experiencing the same sort of revolution. It’s suddenly easy for content developers to share their content; it’s the age of abundance.

Weller listed several requisites for the pedagogy of abundance:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Social-based
• Network is valuable
• Crowdsourcing

Looking at that list, it’s very heavily influenced by principles of the Open Source movement and, consequently, the Open Educational Resources movement. That movement was given a huge boost in terms of available content, quality of content, and certainly profile by MIT’s large-scale OpenCourseWare project.

One problem, however, with this model is that, while the content is free to consumers, it’s not free to the producers. In a November 10th Guardian article, author Harriet Swain states that it costs MIT between $10,000 and $15,000 to put material for each course online. She also mentions that Utah State University recently had to freeze its own project after failing to raise an addition $120,000 US/year needed to fund their project. MIT’s project is being paid for—at least partially—with donations and corporate sponsors. I suspect some of that cost is rights clearance for materials and converting courses developed prior to the project to the OpenCourseWare format. If so, the cost should go down as authors are encouraged to make use of free materials and develop in a format appropriate for easy publication via OpenCourseWare. Still, it does demonstrate that producing and disseminating high-quality free content is in itself not necessarily free.

Nevertheless, several institutions, including the Open University, are still committed to producing this content, not to mention countless individuals. Free content that we can remix. reuse, and repurpose fits beautifully and naturally into several of Weller’s suggested models, like resource-based learning and problem-based learning. However, it can also fit into constructivism, communities of practice, and connectivism too, where we’re actively building a shared understanding of materials through exploration and collaboration.

With the glut of content available, it’s easy to drown. Backchannel discussion talked about the need for information filters and crap detection (see Howard Rheingold’s excellent article). With too much choice comes uncertainty and second-guessing, something Barry Schwartz has done some research on. Shared exploration and collaboration works well with the “guide on the side” metaphor, where you have subject expert mentors who help create “paths” through the sea of content, providing an intelligent information filter.

George Siemens mentioned that this was similar to Darken’s (1996) “wayfinder” metaphor from gaming, an apt linkage. This skill is necessary for both learners and mentors, because we’re both in a transition period between scarcity and abundance. The information filtering issue probably won’t be as pronounced or maybe even worth mentioning by subsequent generations. Does that render the pedagogy of abundance a meaningless discussion or concept? I don’t think so, because we’re still talking about ways to promote participatory learning and encourage connected constructivism, regardless of the strategies people use to locate the content needed to do that.

Weller’s presentation ends with three conclusions:

1. There’s nothing in a pedagogy of abundance.
2. There are sufficient theories already; they just need to be recast.
3. None of the existing theories adequately captures the technology and behaviour, so a new theory is required.

Initially, I tended towards two, although I commented during the presentation that many of the suggested pedagogies can be mixed and matched. If you’re mixing and matching, you could end up creating something new, which could potentially make it number three.

Resources and References:

• Darken, R.P. & Sibert, J.L. (1996) ‘Wayfinding Strategies and Behaviors in Large Virtual Worlds’, presented at Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Common Ground, Vancouver, Canada, April 13-18, ACM. pp:142-149.
• Rheingold, H. (2009) ‘Crap Detection 101’, SFGate, blog entry posted June 30, 2009. Accessed November 17, 2009.
• Schwartz, B. (2004) ‘The Tyranny of Choice’, Scientific American, April 2004.
• Schwartz, B (2006) A Paradox of Choice – TED talk by Barry Schwartz
• Swain, H. (2009) ‘Any Student, Any Subject, Anywhere’, The Guardian, News -> Education -> Access to University. Accessed November 10, 2009.
• Weller, M. (2009) A Pedagogy of Abundance slides at Slideshare (with audio track)

The requirements to complete the “Insane in the Membrane” achievement.
Image from WoWWiki (2009)

I want to say something about the kinds of motivations people have for playing World of Warcraft. Specifically, I want to enumerate factors that motivate players to persist in the game even when it involves tasks that are repetitive, boring, or seemingly impossibly long.

For example, there’s an achievement in World of Warcraft called “Insane in the Membrane” that gives the completer a reward of an in-game title of “The Insane.” This achievement requires you to raise your reputation points with different game factions to exalted, the highest level. Generally, you need about 21,000 points to reach exalted. Points are gained by completing quests, collecting and turning in items, or sometimes killing certain types of things. If you only had to gain exalted reputation with one or two factions, this would not be difficult. However, you need to do this with eight different factions, most of which are not factions you would be accruing large amounts of reputation with during the normal course of play.

To increase the difficulty, several of the factions involved have rival factions. With those factions, as you gain reputation with one, you lose reputation points with the rival faction, making the process of completing this achievement complex in addition to time-consuming. The WoWWiki (2009) page describes some strategies for completing this achievement and the complexities of the faction-rival relationships.

Most tasks players undertake are not going to be as complex, time-consuming, or mind-numbing to complete as the aptly-named “Insane in the Membrane”. There are, however, many smaller day-to-day activities necessary for successful raiding or to get some particular piece of gear, such as doing daily quests to earn gold, or harvesting materials for potions or enchantments, or completing instance and after instance to get badge rewards or reputation rewards. I’m making it sound like getting achievements or gear is the be-all, end-all, but I think the situation is more complex than that. It’s that hypothesis I want to verify.

Other things I would like to be able to comment on include the relationships between gender and motivation, or motivation and age, or possibly even motivation and nationality. I do not necessarily believe there will be a relationship between motivation and nationality necessarily, but how can you definitively say if you do not look for the correlation? That gives me the following questions I want answered:

1. What motivates people to play World of Warcraft?
2. What motivates people to persist in very boring or difficult tasks?
3. Is there a relationship between gender and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
4. Is there a relationship between age and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
5. Is there a relationship between nationality and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
6. Is there a relationship between character roles and classes and motivation?

With those six questions in mind and the original study idea of determining motivation via analysis of free-form essays about motivation, I can now go ahead and develop the specific survey questions that will help elicit data to answer those questions.

Going back to considering my approach-whether I should start with planning versus start with survey question-it was not as clearcut as I expected. By starting with some potential survey questions and then thinking about the answers I would get from them, I gained a better idea about what answers I wanted, a kind of iterative development process. Sometimes putting the horse first helps you know where and how to put the cart!

References:

WoWWiki. (2009) Insane in the Membrane, [online] WoWWiki. Available from http://www.wowwiki.com/Insane_in_The_Membrane (Accessed November 6, 2009).

Elsheindra (me)

Hello, my name is Michelle Hoyle. By day, I’m a respectable Open University course author, associate lecturer, and course presentation chair. At night, I assume my secret identity: Elsheindra, night elf guild mistress of The One on a European World of Warcraft (WoW) server. You’re probably thinking that massively multiple online role playing games (MMORPGs), like WoW, are just for kids. In fact, according to research (Lenhart et al, 2008; Yee, 2008), only about 20% of WoW players are between the ages of 12 to 19. That means some 80% of players are solid, upstanding citizens of the world. They could be your tutors. They could be your next door neighbours. They could be that person you see walking down the street or buying beef at the butcher’s. World of Warcraft, as of May 2009, was holding steady at 11.5 million active subscribers (Blandeburgo, 2009; Chuang, 2009). That’s over 60% of the online gaming market. It’s the most successful personal computer game ever to be released.

What is it that compels these people to spend around 20 to 24 hours a week (Hagel and Brown, 2009; Yee, 2005) in a virtual world? Is it the killing? Is it the girls? Is it the beautiful scenery? Is it the fantastic fashions? People’s motivations vary, so I can’t give you a universal motivation, but I can reveal something about why I play. I play for three reasons: because I’m a community builder, because I’m a teacher, and because I love to help people. They’re all a bit related. I have spent my life bringing people together and helping them form cohesive, long-lasting communities. It started back in the 1980s with electronic bulletin boards and continues today with World of Warcraft. That’s why I run a guild and co-lead an alliance of guilds.

A guild in World of Warcraft is a collection of people who share things in common. The game gives them some tools for sharing, like a shared chat area, calendar, and a bank in which to store money or items for common use. They usually share a philosophy. My guild, for example, is a social guild with a philosophy of doing random acts of kindness. An allied guild is composed of people together for friendship or fun. When my guild members aren’t out being kind to the other 4000 people on the server, they have each other to group with on small tasks, called quests, like curing sick deer or ridding an area of nasty rabid bears. A guild is also a pool of people with which to go on longer adventures in groups of five for rewards like armour and gold in mazelike environments where there are obstacles to overcome and difficult, large monsters to kill—so-called dungeons. The alliance of guilds I help lead allows smaller social-minded guilds like mine to be able to participate in even larger, more complex adventures that require 10, 25, or 40 people at a time. It is very rewarding to be in a position to enable people to have fun, but at the same time promote learning of important social interaction and problem solving skills.

Where does the learning come from? The learning is, in fact, everywhere in the game. Those 5-person dungeon groups or the larger 25-person groups require leaders to decide on strategy and direct the other people with varied motivations. Some people go to these dungeons only to get better gear. That’s their motivation. Other people go for the feeling of accomplishment in participating in something difficult. When people are there for gear, there can be clashes over who should get it, which requires good interpersonal relationship skills and diplomacy on the part of the group leader. In our guild alliance, we’ve had leaders good at strategy and telling people what to do but with terrible interpersonal skills. That made their adventures not very fun, so people were reluctant to participate. Likewise, running a successful guild over a long period of time requires all manner of leadership and diplomacy skills. WoW is a safe, low-risk environment in which to learn these things and they can transfer into real-world rewards (Brown and Thomas, 2006).

Elsheindra as a healing tree

In order to contribute to a team effectively, people need to learn to play their characters well. Each character has specific abilities. Elsheindra, my character, is a druid healer. She cures people of diseases and poisons and heal their bodies of damage they have taken while fighting. I’ve specialized in being a healer for over four years. I’ve become really, really good at healing by dint of lots of practice and much analysis of how things work. I have pride in my abilities and I love being able to help people in the game in a non-violent fashion, because I was not much interested in hacking and slashing at things. Other people are extremely interested in effectively killing things and devote hours outside of the game to reading about their character’s role and how to improve on it, often in very tiny increments. I’m very willing to share my knowledge and experience with other people and often other very good players are too.

I’ve told you a lot about what kinds of things I do in World of Warcraft and my initial motivations. What I haven’t told you are the things I’ve gained: love, acceptance, friendship, and a Ph.D. project, in order of importance. I’m currently researching what elements in games like WoW contribute to motivation and whether or not that can be transferred effectively into distance learning (Hoyle, 2009a; 2009b). Both feature activities that are a lot of work and, let’s face it, aren’t fun. In World of Warcraft, though, people persist with these difficult, not-fun tasks. I know I’ve persisted in some things because of the friends I’ve made. Those friendships have even transcended the virtual world, with people helping me move from apartment to apartment multiple times, even though they live in a different city.

Basil, my partner

The alliance of guilds I co-run just had a real-life adventure at Bletchley Park and a BBQ at my house afterwards, one of several such successful large-scale events over the years. It’s also not uncommon for some of my guild mates to just come and visit from other parts of the UK or from other countries. One of my guild mates even came along from Denmark to Canada for the summer. Are we just strange misfits? That’s a common perception of gamers. I don’t fit in lots of places but in WoW there’s a place for me, as there is for them, and it’s not just because “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. Finally, “Basil”, my real-life partner, is someone I met in WoW because he was helping me co-lead the alliance of guilds. We’ve been together for over two and a half years. We still play WoW together on a regular basis, although not 20 some hours a week. There’s nothing like a romantic date night with your beloved and 23 other friends.

WoW is like a fairy tale: magic, dragons, true love, fashion, elves, and orcs; but it’s also what I’ve made of it: a place to be myself and to do the things I love to do.

References

Blandeburgo, B. (2009) ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Brown, J.S. & Thomas, D. (2006) ‘You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!’ Wired, 14.04 [Online] Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Chuang, T. (2009) ‘WoW Stuck at 11.5 Million Subscribers; Blizz Focused on StarCraft, Diablo’, OCRegister Blizzard Blog, blog entry posted May 7, 2009. Available from: http://gaming.freedomblogging.com/2009/05/07/wow-stuck-at-115-million-subscribers-blizz-focused-on-starcraft-diablo/2201/ (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hagel, J. & Brown, J.S. (2009) ‘How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation’ Business Week Online, January 14 [Online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2009/id20090114_362962.htm (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M.A. (2009a) ‘Levelling Lifelong Learning: Annual Progress Review’, E1n1verse, blog entry posted June 7, 2009. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org/archives/2009/06/levelling_lifel.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M. (2009b) WoW! Roberts & Susans Game Learning, [online] Slide presentation. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Eingang/wow-roberts-and-susans-game-learning-a-look-at-world-of-warcraft-higher-education-learning-and-motivation (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Lenhart, A. et al. (2008) Teens, Video Games, and Civics, Pew Internet & American Life Project. Available from: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Teens-Video-Games-and-Civics.aspx (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2005) ‘MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours’, The Daedalus Project, blog entry posted January 11, 2005. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000891.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

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