I have posted my dissertation document below. This is the final version; I am officially phd'd. :) I don't include here the supplementary video files.
Abstract to the project follows the widget.
In this study, I analyze the multi-layered communities of practice within a virtual world, centered on highly collaborative gameplay. I focus in particular on one community of gamers, and the larger social community of which they are a part. I examine collaborative practices, as the group repeatedly participates in one activity within the game, requiring months to complete. My central research questions for this project are:
1. How is cognitive work achieved in the activity system?
2. What are the practices of newcomers to the community? How does familiarity with the social community influence participation?
3. What are the collaborative practices of the larger social game community (the guild)? How is the guild able to evolve from a casual group to one focused on intense forms of gameplay?
I approach the problem through three theoretical frameworks: distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995a, 1995b), communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and repertoires of collaborative practices (Barron et al., 2009). Each encourages the investigation of data at multiple levels. Through the distributed cognition framework, I describe four levels of representation in the activity system, leading to an analysis of the cognitive work of that system, including individual team members, forms of communication, software interface elements, and other tools and resources. Via the communities of practice theoretical view, I conceptualize differing forms of practice by newcomers, according to the individual’s familiarity with not only the activity, but also the social community. Last, the repertoires of collaborative practices framework allows me to view the practices within, and extending outside of the community, especially noting tensions via four planes of analysis.
My conception of community is similar to that of Wenger (1998); an individual is simultaneously a member of multiple, overlapping, porous communities. To isolate just one community is to negate the rich context in which the activity of interest takes place. I take this to be a central theme of my research. I investigate a team of raiders in the virtual game world, who participate in raids: hours-long team activities that involve a great amount of communication and coordination of actions, interdependence of teammates, and execution of strategy. In addition, I look toward the social group of which most participants were members: the guild. Guilds are social organizations within the virtual world, and often shape the experience of the raiding activity team, as I illustrate in this research project.
This dissertation serves as one response to calls for more investigation into collaborative practices and forms of participation (Hornsey, Grice, Jetten, Paulsen, & Callan, 2007; Levine, Choi, & Moreland, 2003), groups and teams in natural settings (Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008; Fuller, Hodkinson, Hodkinson, & Unwin, 2005), the multi-layered nature of community (Wilson & Peterson, 2002), as well as the environments in which the collaborative interactions take place (Stahl, 2006). In particular, I build upon the influential work of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), investigating a knowledgeable newcomer. This is an individual who joins a community with a high level of expertise, yet unfamiliar with the community from a social perspective. I show, through case studies, that a knowledgeable newcomer participated rather centrally with the community, as he innovated on team strategy and performed a crucial function in activity, contrary to the LPP theory. In addition, I argue that no activities within this particular community of raiding gamers can be seen as peripheral, as defined via LPP. Newcomers were given tasks central to the activity, the costs of error were high, and activities were learned in order, by actually doing them along with the oldtimers of the community. In addition, I present a case study of an unknown newcomer, who is prevented from participating legitimately, in that this person is not given access to the main channel of communication, and thus to the oldtimers of the community. This contrasts with the experience of the case investment (novice) newcomer, an individual who was a part of the larger social community and had the potential to maintain and reproduce the community, in her trajectory from newcomer to oldtimer. This type of newcomer was supported throughout the learning process by the community. I investigate issues of trust and positioning throughout the analyses of newcomers.
Through analysis of the larger social community (the guild), I find the use of a particular rewards system as reflective and constitutive of the guild’s emerging identity as an end-game guild. I trace the guild’s development from a casual community, encouraging diverse forms of gameplay and player types, to an end-game guild, focused solely on the intense collaborative activities of raiding. This is investigated via key events for the community: guild meetings. In each meeting, over time, I extract guild goals and tensions emerging throughout conversation with guild members. I then trace the evolution of the aforementioned rewards system, illustrating tensions between individual goals, and the goals of the guild. I also focus on two individual case studies in this investigation of guild practices, describing one guild member’s use of the game as a testbed for leadership skills, which he then enacts in the real world context of his family business. The second case study individual brings his military experience into the game world.
Finally, through my analysis of the cognitive work accomplished by the system of raiding activity, I discover weaknesses in the system that might impede collaboration and communication. I present several ideas for redesign, both to address the weaknesses revealed through the raiding system, and via the analyses of collaborative practices at both levels of community: the raiders and the guild. I believe this work contributes to an emerging understanding of the different forms of cultural practice enacted across contexts, the differing participation profiles of newcomers, as well as the cognitive work involved in a computer-mediated collaborative environment.
