Learning from the Games Designers

The designers of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games face a significant educational challenge. They need to efficiently and subtly teach new players how to use their game. This involves teaching players about the environment and the interface whist keeping them motivated and drawing them into the challenges of the game itself. This is situated learning in which the games designer is the ‘master’ and the player is the ‘apprentice’.

This educational challenge is similar to the one faced by those intending to teach in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) such as Second Life. There are a significant amount of basic skills that need to be mastered before students can successfully engage in meaningful collaborative activity. The traditional ‘orientation’ process in Second Life is didactic and generic, teaching skills in an abstract technical manner. This has come about because unlike an MMO, Second Life has no shared goal, its possible uses are many and varied. However, a teacher who wishes to use Second Life should have a defined set of goals or learning outcomes they wish to achieve. They should be able to define task orientated activities which are relevant to the students motivations, for example, Art and Design students can be asked to compete to build the tallest monolith as a focus for learning building skills in Second Life rather than being given general instructions on how to create, scale and texture objects. In teaching terms this seems like an obvious approach but often when faced with a complex new platform teaching practitioners will often fall back on a basic instructivst style which may not align well with the approach generally taken at HE level for that discipline.

This is where we can learn from the MMO designers who are careful not to fall into this trap as it is likely to make a players initial engagement in a game seem like a chore. For subscription based MMOS such as World of Warcraft this would mean a high drop out rate and a massive loss of revenue, something that the HE sector can emphathise with.

The JISC funded Habitat project intends to learn from the game designers by capturing the processes in World of Warcraft in its initial stages and mapping the styles and types of task to the learning outcomes they fulfil. The data will be captured using pre and post activity questionnaires and video screen capture synchronised with video of the player at the computer. This data will then be used in the process of designing appropriate orientation sessions for pilots in Second Life with students from two disciplines: Art and Design & Philosophy. The Habitat project recognises that some of the most sophisticated collaborative learning spaces online at the moment are MMOs and that the design of these games can be a relevant model for the pedagogical structures that we put in place for the educational use of MUVEs such as Second Life.

Keep watching http://www.openhabitat.org to see how we get on.

The Habitat Project Launches

No, not an opportunity to test stylish yet knowingly kitsch home furnishings but a research project piloting the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments (think Second Life). TALL heads up a large project team on the project which runs until March 2009. Read the official blurb below or visit www.openhabitat.org for more info.

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The JISC funded Habitat project is a collaboration between TALL at the University of Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan University, King’s College London, Essex University and Dave Cormier of Prince Edward Island University. It will take an innovative approach to encouraging creative online collaboration in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) – the online 3D spaces in which each user is represented by an ‘avatar’ or 3D character.

The project will generate solutions to the challenges of teaching, learning and collaboration in MUVEs. These solutions will be primarily in the form of guidelines, models and exemplars but will also be supported by the development/appropriation of software tools and services in and around the MUVEs themselves.
During discussions with members of the Emerge community, teaching staff and students, it became clear the MUVEs offer a number of interesting opportunities for teaching and learning. These include the ability to collaboratively design and build objects/structures and the sense of presence or ‘being there’ that comes across when interacting in an MUVE.

The Habitat project will build on these principles by running a number of pilots which are integrated into the teaching of art & design and philosophy.

A competition to build a structure in the Second Life MUVE which reflects their current practice will be set as part of the first year art & design undergraduate degree based at Leeds Metropolitan University. Parallel to this the project will facilitate discussions in an MUVE with students who have attended one of the University of Oxford’s online short courses in philosophy. The art & design students will have the opportunity to meet face-to-face during the pilot in contrast to the philosophy students who are distributed around the world.

The pilots are designed to explore the effects of working in an MUVE on collaborative group work and on the effects of being represented as an avatar over and above using text, sound or video to communicate. In addition to this the pilots are designed to encourage communication between the two disciplines to assess the potential of MUVEs to bring together diverse student groups.

Habitat will predominantly be using the Second Life MUVE because of its ubiquity and relative stability. The project will also be experimenting with OpenSim, an open source MUVE and a MUVE provided by IBM. These are representative of the widening range of 3D collaborative environments which are emerging across the web and which afford intriguing opportunities for teaching and learning.

Poster with bloated title wins award at ALT-C

I gave my talk on ‘Cultural Capital and Community Development in the pursute of Slaying Dragons’ at the ALT-C e-learning conference last week. The talk was well received which was very encouraging. The poster of the talk won a runners-up prize in the poster competition! How much of this was down to tactical voting I cannot say but it would seem that the e-learning community is becoming gradually more interested in the possibleuse of Multi-User Virtual Environments.

Talking about Dragons with Dragons

Last Friday I partook in a stressful but useful event run by JISC. Anyone who could make it had the chance to pitch their project ideas for the Users and Innovation callrun by Lawrie Phipps. The format was similar to the BBC ‘Dragons Den’ programme. Each project had to go before a couple of JISC representatives or ‘dragons’ and pitch their idea in a 5-10 min presentation. The dragons would then feedback on the idea and point out/discuss it’s pros and cons.

I was surprised to find that this process put me into my old ‘exam fear’ mode and I panicked for most of the day. However, there is nothing better for focusing an idea than knowing that you have to explain it to a third party, especially when some of it relates to World of Warcraft! It forced us to look at the marking criteria for the call and to turn vague details into well thought out project plans.

Our actual pitch to the dragons went well and their feedback was very helpful. It seems to make sense to do this kind of grilling before, not after the projects are underway. Hopefully it will lead to a better breed of projects.

Social Capital and Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying

What can the massively multiplayer game ‘World of Warcraft’ teach us about how to facilitate learning communities? Below is a video of the talk I gave at the Games Learning and Society conference in Madison Wisconsin. (Running time 26 minutes)[flv:http://tall.conted.ox.ac.uk/video/maina.flv 500 375]

If you want more details before watching here is the abstract…

This presentation is an evaluation of ethnographic field work conducted in and around the World of Warcraft MMO. The study focuses on the motivation of guild members to construct communities of practice both to learn and to socialize. This suggests that the guilds can act as useful models for understanding how online social networks function and how they could influence the ideology of next generation e-learning services.

Successful collaborative learning can only be sustained if the individuals involved feel part of a group or community in which they can trust. The most robust communities tend to be those that form via a collective aim or interest; their formation has a social underpinning and is not totally utilitarian.

If an aspiration of e-learning is to move away from simply providing online programs of study, demarcated by subject, to increasingly fluid spaces in which students can build social networks, then we need to understand how contemporary collaborative and participatory environments encourage the formation of these types of groupings.

Some of the most sophisticated examples of online community creation and management take place in and around MMO environments. The current apex of this field is the ‘guild’ system which suffuses the World of Warcraft MMO. Guilds are effectively goal-oriented clubs or societies, many of which utilize the latest Web 2.0 technologies out-of-game and multi-channel text chat and VOIP systems in-game both to organize and to socialize.

This paper is based on data collected over a period of six months from an ongoing ethnographic study comprising self-reflexive observation and semi-structured interviews conducted in World of Warcraft and face-to-face with guild members. This extends into a study of the social software used out-of-game by community members that acts as a communication base for the guilds.

The data is evaluated using Wenger’s notion of communities of practice, which highlights the interweaving of goal-orientated learning and the immersion of those participating in trusted social networks. This has the effect of generating and communicating what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, the lack of which often makes online learning a poor second to traditional face-to-face learning.

The challenge here is how to abstract underpinning principles and practice that will be of value to e-learning away from the immediate goals or ideology of a particular MMO. This is not to suggest that killing dragons in collaborative groups is the future of e-learning. Instead it proposes that much can be gained from reflecting on the success of MMOs in motivating the formation of vibrant online communities and the ways in which these communities interweave socializing and learning.

Structure vs Community?

This post assumes that you agree that collaborative/group work is a good method of online learning and that effective learning takes place when the individuals involved are part of a community. The ideas in this post are as a result of some in depth discussions with members of emerge. This post is not very well put together in it’s use of terms like ‘community’, ‘group’ and ‘collaboration’ but I hope you can see the basic principles I’m trying to work with.

The basic dichotomy?

  • Too much structure = restriction on community formation, groups stay in pre-defined ‘networks’ and do not thrive?
  • Too little structure = lack of direction, lack of coherence, community less likely to form?

We agree that it’s not possible to mandate a community but we understand that a community forms only when certain structures are in place. We are not sure exactly what those structures should be or who should be responsible for putting them in place(?) We are also not sure how much structure should be put in place by the educational institution or tutors and how much space/flexibility should be provided for the students to experiment with.

Some basic questions?
Where should the structure come from to encourage a successful community?

  • How much should come from the facilitators within the community?
  • How much should come from the members of that community?
  • How much should come from the nature of the tools used by that community?

What is the difference between a facilitator and a member? Can one become the other? In a community are we always both?

The rise of web2.0 and immersive environments brings the above questions to the fore. I think that it has only recently become practical for elearning to be relatively unstructured online as social networking etc has become more main-stream. We can see the emergence of online communities and the significance this has for learning but we don’t know precisely how to encourage the formation of communities (It may in fact be more of a craft skill than a science). We can see how engaged, motivated individuals are keen to communicate collaborate and participate, thereby forming communities (emerge is a good example) but we aren’t sure how to encourage/lead a bunch of slightly alienated first years to act in a communal manner.

I would argue that innovative work/research in elearning needs to find answers to the questions posed above. ‘Next generation’ elearning will increasing be about managing and facilitating collaboration and communities, about encouraging cohorts of students to move from being an institutional defined network of individuals to members of learning communities that reach beyond traditional institutional boundaries.

So, what would an attempt to answer these questions look like as a ‘project’? Well here is my first, very sketchy attempt to outline one possible route.

The focus would be on Second Life in this particular case but with the understanding that any educational activity in SL will probably actually be overseen by associated 2D systems (Moodle, FaceBook etc) As I mentioned in an earlier post I think that most healthy communities exist in more than one tool or environment. i.e Emerge uses Elgg, Elluminate Skype Email etc. The community has the same relationship to a single tool as a virus has to a single host. If the tool creates the right environment then the community will grow stronger. It will have stronger bonds and will potentially expand in numbers. As the community evolves it will move hosts/tools or at least shift its emphasis within a group of tools. For example moving from a Blog focus to a Skype focus and back again as ideas circulate.

Clearly it would be a good idea to look at other successful online communities to try and discover what kind of structures they have put in place. It would also be useful to gather together examples of current good/successful practice of teaching/group work in Second Life.

Next we would plan a series of group/collaborative activities that range from the highly structured (eg step-by-step with a tutor) through to the open (eg form your own group and build a demonstration of a scientific principle of your choice). We would then put a range of students through these activities to discover which combination of students and activities fostered community like activity.

The main outcome would be guidance on how to encourage online community and how best to run collaborative activities in an immersive environment. An ideal result would be a series of activity models that gradually move from the structured to the unstructured and draw a cohort of students through to a point where they are a relatively self-supporting community. We could learn from the gaming community in this respect. Below is a chart that shows the amount of time it takes to reach each ‘level’ in World of Warcraft.

Leveling_TimeFrom ‘Alone Together?’ Ducheneaut et al. 2006

As you can see the time/effort needed rises fairly steadily from level to level. This is good game design, could it be good course design? The game has the advantage over a traditional course in that there are explicit rewards every other level (spells, amour etc) is there an educational equivalent?

The higher the level the more likely you will need to be in a group to successful tackle and quest (activity). The groups need to be larger as you reach the ‘end’ of the game with groups of 20 or more some of the quests above level 50. The forming of these groups is organised by the players themselves and is the main reason that guilds (communities) form. So you start the game doing structured activates alone and could end the game collaborating as part of a community inventing methods and tactics. Sounds like a good educational model to me…

Dave’s top 10 musings on the encouragement of community in Multi-User Virtual Environments.

So, if you are interested in building a ‘community of learners’ in or around an MUVE rather than simply diving in, doing a set activity and then leaving this may be of interest. What I am exploring here is what it takes to move from an institutionally prescribed network of individuals, such as a cohort, to a community with members. This is the difference between being involved and feeling a sense of ‘belonging’.

What we have to consider is that a community is a social entity that exists within a culture. The elements that need to be in place to encourage a community to form and thrive are a hybrid of the social and the practical or in our case, the social and the technological. It’s not easy to separate these notions and as such some of the points below can be engineered in the facilitation of a community and some have to be driven by the community itself.

I have constructed the following points after considering the manner in which community is fostered in World of Warcraft (WoW), both by the form of the game itself and by the players. WoW is a good example of a working through of the challenges faced by those of us interested in encouraging communities in MUVEs.

Separating the ideas below into 10 points is a convenient simplification. In reality the notions tend to flow into one another and may call for a daunting Venn diagram at some point.

1. There should be shared or mutually supported goals.
These goals could be wide ranging and interdependent, including the social, personal, educational etc. Clearly, any community needs some basic underpinning goals bring members together with a sense of purpose. These act as a benchmark for progression and can help roles to emerge. This purpose of these goals could be highly focused as in the case of learning a specific skill or more nebulous, for example, having fun. Ultimately these goals should be best achieved or approached by collaborative means.

2. Members need to be able to control the presentation of their identity.
This could be a ‘genuine’ presentation of your real life identity or a version of your ‘professional’ identity. It could also be a fantasy identity wrapped up in a complex role play scenario. The important factor is that the technology needs to give the community member the ability to define their identity in a form that suits them. It shouldn’t be prescriptive for example providing a template for a ‘student’ profile. This is likely to restrict the vitality of a community.

3. There has to be a smooth learning curve.
These environments are complex, including multiple modes of participation and levels of interactivity. The social norms in an environment are often implicit and can only be learned initially by observation. The environment needs to have a number of simple structured tasks that beginners can engage with and make mistakes / discoveries in private before entering into more public areas. In the case of WoW the user interface options builds as the individual progresses through increasingly challenging tasks or quests. These quests start as challenges for a single player and gradually become more complex, requiring collaborative groups. This continues until the top levels of the game which require groups of 25 to achieve certain goals.

4. The MUVE should be part of a larger ecology of services.
No successful virtual environment exists without supporting services such as an associated website. These websites often give a back-story or rational to the environment. They set the scene and hint at appropriate uses / behaviour within the environment in question. They can also act as a reference point or a location to manage groups and events. In the case of elearning the MUVE will probably need to be supported by a virtual learning environment or some other form of group management system. The ‘guilds’ which are communities that form around WoW always have a home site. It is usually based round a discussion forum and news / events system. Many guild members would consider these sites rather then the game itself to be their ‘home’. The MUVE is just part of a larger landscape of tools and should not be considered in isolation. It is also worth noting that MUVEs tend themselves to be a collection of services including, text chat, search, instant messaging, object repositories, VOIP etc. The 3D presence of avatars is only one aspect of the MUVE and the way in which members of a community appropriate the other services within the environment can’t be easily predicted or guided. No community survives in a single tool or service. Often email actually underpins the interpersonal relationships in even the most sophisticated of MUVEs or social networking sites.

5. There should be flexible grouping systems.
Any healthy community will facilitate a range of events that involve the whole community right through to allowing private one-to-one conversations. Communities tend to contain multiple sub-groups or overlapping ‘communities of practice’. The MUVE and associated services should allow members to easily create and disband groups of different sizes. The rational for these groups will vary from the organisational / institutional to the social / private. A system that only allows formal, visible groups will not encourage a ‘ground-up’ flow of information and will reduce the opportunity for socialising. This form of sub-group socialising is one of the most important factors in an online community giving members a sense of belonging.

6. Members need to feel a sense of ownership.
This ownership could be of objects, ideas, skills, identity, role etc. This is why it is essential to have a persistent presence in the environment. The artefact or concept could be individually or collectively owned, it should also be possible to trade certain items in a bartering, monetary, intellectual, or social economy. Some artefacts will have a relatively fixed value while others will loose value over time, such as certain skills / knowledge. This erosion of value over time can be one of the prime motivators for frequently engaging with a community.

7. There should be an opportunity for roles to emerge.
The notion of role is closely related to that of identity and group. Members of a community are not equal in power or responsibility. Members are comfortable being part of a hierarchy of roles. This hierarchy is likely to be more subtle than classic corporate structures it may be relatively ‘flat’ but whether it’s explicit or implicit a community will have an understanding of the differing roles played by its members. With roles, as with group structures, there is a clear distinction between those ascribed institutionally and those acquired or built socially. For example, in WoW each player chooses a fantasy role from a list prescribed by the game i.e. dwarf, elf, healer etc. These roles come with certain skills and a back story and therefore help the player to find their place within the grand narrative of the environment. If the player engages with others in the environment then social roles may emerge which go beyond the initially prescribed role. These may be based on skill, reliability, trustworthiness, sense of fun, leadership qualities, pastoral qualities etc. They might build on the institutionally prescribed role or diverge from it. The overall point here is that members need to play a role within a community whether true to themselves or fantasy. They also need to feel that they can change their role or reshape it if necessary. In WoW and in many MUVEs this is often achieved by members owning multiple alternative characters or avatars. This clarity in individual roles but fluidity to move between roles within a community is a powerful aspect of virtual social environments and is in contrast to many real life communities.

8. There has to be frequent opportunities to generate and exchange capital.
I use the term capital in a broad sense i.e social, economic, cultural, intellectual and practical / skills. If the environment does not allow a free exchange of capital then that capital rapidly looses its value and can be challenging to generate. The MUVE and games like WoW are very effective at generating and communicating / exchanging all five types of capital mentioned above. The services that make-up an MUVE such as Second Life are carefully designed to create opportunities to generate and exchange capital. In this sense a community could be seen as a social phenomenon designed to appropriate and further these opportunities. Many environments fail because they are too restrictive and stifle the flow of capital or are too prescriptive in the provision of channels for capital.

9. There should be a combination of structured and ‘free’ activities.
The ‘authority’ (and there always is one) should provide a number of structured activities. In WoW these are the quests which are discrete goal orientated activities that give a sense of focus and progression to the game. They also help to reinforce notions of role and identity, encourage collaboration and give a sense of a shared experience. All healthy communities engage in structured activities which relate to their overall goals. Often these activities lead to some form of socially recognised and visible symbol or reward such as, attaining a higher level, receiving a new piece of kit to wear or placing the letters ‘D’ and ‘r’ in front of a members name. These symbols may only have meaning within a single community or there meaning might extend out into a larger society. The environment should also allow or facilitate informal or unstructured activities. These activities are likely to help the formation of new peer / interest groups and can be a good opportunity to take a break from the more public requirements of community membership.

10. Members need to feel they have influence within their community and over their environment.
Members want to feel they can create and destroy aspects of the environment and that their presence influences the flow of activities, ideas and thinking within the community. This concept is interwoven with that of role, especially in relation to mentoring which is a crucial mechanism within a community. If a member does not feel they have the influence they deserve relative to the investment they have made in a given community then they are likely to disengage. Sometimes this problem can be corporate and effect an entire environment. Many of the disputes between the members of WoW or Second Life arise when the authority in question reduces members influence over the environment or their roles. Often the mere visibility of an action taken by the authority reminds members that they do not have total freewill. This can lead to a reduction in members wiliness to buy into or even ‘believe’ in the environment and therefore reduces their sense of belonging.

Multi-User Virtual Environments: What are they good for?

An interesting discussion took place in the MUVE carousel session I attended at the ‘Emerge’ (emerge.elgg.org) event last week. It would seem that at the moment MUVE can be read as ‘Second Life’ although this is probably just a temporary state of play. In any event SL is a good place to experiment and whatever we learn will be transposable.

Many people / institutions had islands in SL but as was pointed out we weren’t being all that collaborative yet. For me the area of MUVEs breaks down into the following points to consider:

  • Does using an MUVE give a more powerful sense of ‘presence’ / identity to those involved. Is this more powerful / useful than purely text based interactions?
  • If this ‘presence’ is (cough) present then in what ways can we use it in the service of online collaboration / socialising?
  • How can being immersed in an environment help the learning process at an HE level?
  • Is this best for distance students or could it be a useful tool in the ‘classroom’ as well?
  • Is this type of environment more, or less, alienating for students / tutors to interact with than other online approaches?
  • Is the level of skill and technology required to interact with these types of environments too high at the moment? Will they ever be ‘mainstream’?

This is just a starting point of course. I’d welcome comments…

In practical terms is can see MUVEs being useful for the following:

  • Creating immersive simulations
  • Recreating contemporary or historical real world environments that have an educational value
  • Developing new forms of collaborative projects, taking group work online to a new level
  • Providing a social underpinning to groups of online courses or a f2f campus / department

The last two points interest me the most and are clearly happening in a slightly different form in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. However, the first two points are probably easier to demonstrate as clear practical uses especially to those who have no experience of MUVEs.