World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a persistent online gaming environment. Each player will log on into a server with thousand other players. At any moment, a server hosts approximately 1600 players. There are hundreds of WoW servers around the world. Released in November 2004, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft is an award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and best-selling PC title.
Role: Student researcher.
Done at: Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, University of California Irvine, CA.
Duration: 8 Week.
Tasks: Literature Review, Contextual Inquiry, Ethnographic Study.
Paper: – Kow. Y. and Das S.: Guilds in World of Warcraft: A Community of Practice. GSRS ‘08 University of California Irvine. here
Abstract
Guilds in World of Warcraft are analyzed as a form of Community of Practice (CoP). Four dualities: participation vs reification, identification versus negotiation, local versus global, and design versus emergent, were observed. However, there are dynamics within and between guilds that cannot be explained by principles of CoP. For example, there are reasons that players join or leave a guild, and transfer between guilds. According to CoP, “identity served as a pivot between the social and the
individual,” yet there exist a space between guilds, where individuals have distinct intensions not conferred by a situated identity. Using Activity Theory, we explained the phenomena using a multi-level analysis, and not just within the middle level. We argued that within the context of inter-community research, CoP needs to be reframed by addressing intentionality of human actors.
