·         The domain – a shared domain of interest that members are committed to and have a shared competence that distinguishes them from others

·         The community – members engage in joint activities and build relationships so that they can learn from each other

·         The practice – members are practitioners who develop a shared resource of knowledge and expertise through sustained interaction

 The community of practice is evident in the guilds of World of Warcraft .  As John Seely Brown  (2005) points out, guild-building is important in WoW. High level quests have to be carried out by a well-organized team with players who have diverse skills e.g. warriors, healers and spell-casters.   The WoW guild has all three elements that Wenger identifies as essential to a community of practice.

David White in his case study of World of Warcraft in Whitton (2010) mentions that there are three significant techniques that WoW uses to encourage the formation of communities of players (or communities of practice):

·         Their management of presence

·         The formation of multi-skilled teams

·         The pursuit of clear goals within an overarching narrative

White claims that the first two techniques have not been properly considered by those designing online learning environments.  White makes the point that interaction in a community requires fostering both a feeling that the environment is safe and a feeling of trust that others in the community will respond to one.  White claims that WoW successful does this by how they manage presence.  The player is immediately aware of the presence of others in the game by being able to see their avatars.  More importantly there is a general chat channel which is open to all, so the player can see the interactions going on without having to risk engaging in interaction.  It is this low-risk management of presence that allows the novice player to learn the etiquette of this new world enabling them to eventually more from being an individual player to a group player.  In addition, Hagel, Brown and Davison stress that there is also there is a whole “’knowledge economy’ surrounding the game –videos, blogs, wikis etc.” (http://blogs.hbr.org/bigshift/2010/01/a-better-way-to-manage-knowled.html )Any player can access these resources to learn more about the game.

White’s discussion about presence resonates with my own experience of WoW.  I am still at the early stages (having attained only level 6 at the time of writing this piece) – so I still do not feel that it is a safe environment – although I feel comfortable enough to go there on my own.  However, I am aware of the open chat channel and I have observed interactions among other players – so I am getting a feel for the community. I have explored some wikis that discuss my role of the priest and the best way to maximise play at different levels.( http://www.wowwiki.com/Starting_a_priest )

I can see that if I decided to continue to play WoW that I could get to a point to start interacting with other players and maybe eventually join a guild.  What I like is that I am not forced to immediately interact with others – that the game world is structured so that I can learn on my own the social norms of the world and that I am allowed to decide to interact in my own time.

Having time to explore the game world and learn about the role you have adopted leads to White’s second point about how WoW encourages the formation of multi-skilled teams.  White makes the point that educators should think of designing goals that require a multi-skilled team.  He feels that assigning roles is crucial to collaboration when it comes to learning.  Ideally he would like learners to be able to experiment with different roles as they can in WoW.

The way WoW manages presence and has quests that require a multi-skilled team encourages the formation of guilds (a community of practice).  I would like to design a game that leads to the development of a community of practice of qualitative data analysts. My goal is to design a game which is about what John Seely Brown calls ‘learning-to-be’ a qualitative analyst as opposed to ‘learning-about’ qualitative analysis.   I am not sure whether a MMOG is the type of game for what I want to do, however, I can see how I can extract the ways that WoW encourages the development of communities of practice.  I could see that the analysis task can be divided initially so that each analyst would be working on part of the data set (could be divided into types of data such as text, graphic, video, and audio). The initial tasks would be simple – organizing and classifying the data, moving on to commenting and reflecting on the data. This initial period would enable the analyst to familiarise themselves with their part of the data set and start to gain confidence in their ideas about the data.  However, to develop the analysis, they will have to work as a team and collectively decide how to code the data and eventually they will need to collectively construct their arguments about how the data addresses their research question.

References

Brown, J.S.  (2005) New Learning Environments for the 21^st Century, Forum for the Future of Higher Education Symposium. Aspen.

Hagel, J., Brown, J.S., and Davison, L. (2010) A Better Way to Manage Knowledge, in Harvard Business Review blog, 19 January 2010

Wenger, E. (2006) Communities of Practice – a brief introduction, http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm

White, D. (2010) Case Study 6: World of Warcraft in Whitton, N. Learning with Digital Games, Abingdon: Routledge.

While playing with the group I heard one of our group members say that they did not like bashing wolves. I found that I didn't like doing it either but I had rationalised it because they were 'diseased' wolves and as such should be culled. However, in a later quest I had to collect the bandanas of some renegades and when I accepted the quest I realised that meant that I had to kill them. I was a bit uneasy about that but I had accepted the quest. I was killed at my first and second attempts but after being resurrected and figuring out (a la Gee) which weapon I should use, I was successful and forgot that I was 'killing' these renegades but just focussed on being successful in completing my task. However, when I went to get my reward and next quest, the quest-giver made a comment about how I didn't mind doing dirty work (or words to that effect). This jolted me out of my complacency and I realised that my character was a murderer. I had deliberately chosen the persona of a priest rather than a warrior to avoid being a 'bad' character. I was surprised at how easily I slipped into a murderer. I had an objective and became focussed on that objective - ignoring the means of achieving it.

I should add that I just came back from giving a paper at a conference in Berlin and spent the weekend exploring Berlin - which included visiting the Jewish museum and part of the Wall which is still standing. I was appalled at the stories of informers but my husband suggested that we did not know what pressures were put on informers. I mention this only because this experience is fresh in my memory and what I find interesting about WoW is how easy it is to be absorbed into a particular culture and a particular way of being. It made me wonder whether I could act more ethically in the WoW culture rather than passively just accepting quests.

Gee talks about three identities when playing a game – the virtual, the real and the projective. A player has some control in constructing their virtual identity in a game but the player’s choice is constrained because she has no control over the game world in which she has to play. So I chose Anavli to be a Priest in WoW so she could be a ‘good’ character.  However, the initial quests in WoW involve killing beasts, killing renegades etc.  My choice of my virtual identity was constrained by the game world in which my character has to live. Gee also talks about a projective identity using the term projective in two senses:

·         Players project their own values and desires onto their virtual identity (in my case Anavli)

·         Players see their virtual identity as a project in making – they need to take ownership of their creation (I have aspirations for the kind of character I want Anavli to become)

After creating my virtual identity, when I entered the game I was a passive player – accepting the quests and not questioning what I was doing. It was when the quest-giver made his remark that my real identity reawakened and questioned how my virtual identity was behaving.  At that point, I think that I began to be aware of my projective identity.  I wanted to take ownership of the kind of character I wanted Anavli to become but I was not sure of the constraints in the game world of WoW. 

Miguel Sicart has written on the ethics of computer games.  His view on ethics of computer games is linked to his definition of a game – ‘A game is not only it rules, its material aspect, but also its experience – the act of playing the game.’ (Sicart 2005:15) He takes the view that games players ‘are moral beings that evaluate their actions and the choices they make’ (Sicart 2005:15). However, he also argues that:

The way games are designed and how that design encourages players to make certain choices, is relevant for the understanding of the ethics of computer games. (Sicart 2009:17)

In his 2005 paper he uses an example from WoW.  WoW designers allowed player vs. player combat (pvp) in certain servers.  Because of the popularity of that feature, the designers decided to implement an honour system – where players got a considerable number of points for killing other players.  (Sicart points out that they did not at the same time implement a dishonour system.)  This design feature led to what the WoW community considered unethical behaviour such as corpse camping (i.e. waiting for other players to resurrect to kill them again when they were weak) and ganking (attacking players who cannot defend themselves).  The WoW community became divided – some liked the honour system, others disliked it so much that they stopped playing in the pvp servers.  The designers resolved this polarization by having certain areas that are designated in the map as battlegrounds. (Sicart was writing in 2005. I have been challenged to a few duels in WoW but I had the option to decline – so this is probably a further design feature refinement of the ethical issue the honour system raised.)

Sicart’s point is that both the player and the rules/fictional worlds are ethical entities which are both responsible for ‘the well being of the whole experience of playing a game’.  My concern was how passively I started to play the game – not reflecting on the experience. That may have been a feature of being totally unfamiliar with this kind of game and concentrating on learning about it.  I also wonder whether the quest-giver’s comment was a deliberate design feature to make me reflect on the nature of my virtual self.  It seems in Sicart’s WoW example, the game designers are responding to community issues.  If that is the case, then perhaps one could argue that WoW is an ethical game.  But I need to play more in it to discover whether that is the case.

Educators designing games need to think carefully of the culture they want to foster.  They need to take care that design features they create do not have negative ethical consequences. At the same time they need to see players as active moral individuals.  As I work with mature adults that is not a problem for me – those working with young children may need to think carefully of their level of maturity.  For both groups, individual and group reflection will help them resolve ethical issues.

References

Gee, James Paul (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy

Sicart, Miguel (2005) Game, Player, Ethics: A virtue ethics approach to computer games, International Review of Information Ethics, vol. 4 (12/2005) 13-18

Sicart, Miguel (2009) Ch1 Introduction in The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.