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We analyze collaborative play in an online video game, World of Warcraft, the most popular multiplayer video game with 11 million players in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Based on an immersive ethnographic study, we describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players’ enjoyment and learning of the game. We discovered that play is characterized by a multiplicity...
Modding - end-user modification of commercial hardware and software - can be traced back at least to 1961 when Spacewar! was developed by a group of MIT students on a DEC PDP-1. Spacewar! evolved into arcade games including Space Wars produced in 1977 by Cinematronics (Sotamaa 2003). In 1992, players altering Wolfenstein 3-D (1992), a first person shooter game made by id Software, overwrote the graphics...
We analyze social affordances from World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO). These affordances contributed to community development and social experiences. To reduce the time needed to play and make gameplay easier, expansions to the game removed or altered many affordances. The changes were appealing to some, but diminished social experience, to the dismay of...
In this paper, we propose a new concept for understanding the role of algorithms in daily life: algorithmic authority. Algorithmic authority is the legitimate power of algorithms to direct human action and to impact which information is considered true. We use this concept to examine the culture of users of Bit coin, a crypto-currency and payment platform. Through Bit coin, we explore what it means...
Micro-task crowd sourcing fosters a labor relation in which large volumes of small, simple tasks are completed at low cost by self-selected online workers. The growth of micro-task crowd sourcing, characterized by apparently low remuneration, begs the question how individual participants perceive the benefits of such micro work. In response we conducted a survey on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a premier...
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting rich and complex social interactions among over 8million players worldwide. In this study, we explore implications of the pervasive “lonely gamer” stereotype, which portrays online gamers as socially isolated and addicted young people, usually male, with few real-life (RL) social ties. This is the first study to directly...
We examine learning culture in a popular online game, world of warcraft. We analyze the way players learn this complex game through chat conversation with peers. We describe three kinds of learning: fact finding, devising tactics/strategy, and acquiring game ethos. We investigate learning in the zone of proximal development as specified in cultural-historical activity theory. We examine the emotional...
Summary form only given. The author discusses play in World of Warcraft, a popular massively multiplayer online game. World of Warcraft enables self-organizing groups of strangers and friends to collaborate on short-term objectives. Such collaborations may reflect coming changes in globalized work in which we increasingly work with remote others we know little about. In game play, the glue that keeps...
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