98,287 research outputs found
Playing ethnography: a study of emergent behaviour in online games and virtual worlds
This study concerns itself with the relationship between game design and emergent social behaviour in massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. This thesis argues for a legitimisation of the study of ācommunities of playā, alongside communities perceived as more āseriousā, such as communities of interest or practice. It also identifies six factors that contribute to emergent social behaviour and investigates the relationship between group and individual identity, and the emergent ways in which these arise from and intersect with the features and mechanics of the game worlds themselves.
Methodology: Under the rubric of ādesign researchā, this study was conducted as an ethnographic intervention, an anthropological investigation that deliberately privileged the online experience whilst acknowledging the performative nature of both game play and the research process itself. The research was informed by years of professional practical experience in game design and playtesting, as well as by qualitative methods derived from the fields of Anthropology, Sociology, Computermediated Communications and the emerging field of Game Studies. The process of conducting the eighteen-month ethnographic study followed the progress of a sub-set of members of the āUru Diaspora,ā a group of 10,000 players who were made refugees when the massively multiplayer game āUru: Ages Beyond Mystā was closed in February of 2004. Uru refugees immigrated into other virtual worlds, using their features and capabilities to create ethnic communities that emulated the culture, artefacts and environments of the original Uru world. Over time, players developed āhybridā cultures, integrating the Uru culture with that of their new homes, and eventually creating entirely new Uru and Myst-inspired content.
The outcome is the identification of six factors that serve as āengines for emergenceā and discusses their relationship to each other, to game design, and to emergent behaviour.
These include:
ā¢ Play Ecosystems: Fixed-Synthetic vs. Co-Created Worlds: Online games and virtual worlds exist along a spectrum, with environments entirely authored by the designer at one end, and those comprised primarily of player-created content and assets on the other, with a range of variations between. The type of world will impact the sort of emergent behaviour that occurs, and worlds that include player-created content will be more inclined to promote emergent behaviour.
ā¢ Communities of Play: Distributed groups formed around play demonstrate distinct characteristics based on shared values and play styles. The study describes in detail one such play community, and analyses the ways in which its characteristic play styles drove its emergent behaviours.
ā¢ The Social Construction of Avatar Identity: Individual avatar identity is constructed through an emergent process engaging social feedback.
ā¢ Intersubjective Flow: A social reading of the psychological notion of āflowā that describes the way in which flow dynamics occur in a social context through play.
ā¢ Productive Play: Countering the traditional contention that play is inherently āunproductiveā as some scholars suggest, the thesis argues that play can be seen as a form of cultural production, as well as fulcrum for creative activity.
ā¢ Porous Magic Circles and the āLudisphereā: The magic circle, which bounds play activities, is more porous than game scholars had previously believed. The term āludisphere' is used to describe the larger context of aggregated play space via the Internet. Also identified are leakages between āvirtual worldsā and āreal lifeā.
By identifying these factors and attempting to trace their roots in game design, the study aims to contribute a new approach to the making and analysis of user experience and creativity āin gameā. The thesis posits that by achieving a deeper cultural understanding of the relationship between design and emergent behaviour, it is possible to make steps forward in the study of āemergenceā itself as a design
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Digital native identity development in virtual worlds
In the transition from childhood to adolescence, teens are engaged in defining who they are and finding a place in the wide world creates insecurity. Digital natives are growing up as part of digital generation where technology is ubiquitous in a young personās life. One online technology commonly used by digital natives are virtual worlds. Increasingly, they have come to rely on this digital media to help them navigate the challenges and issues they face in this period of life. This paper presents a research framework designed to provide a road map for the IS community in conducting research into this new and exciting area of virtual worlds and their impact on digital native identity development
De-Roling from Experiences and Identities in Virtual Worlds
Within dramatherapy and psychodrama, the term āde-rolingā indicates a set of activities that assist the subjects of therapy in ādisrobingā themselves from their fictional characters. Starting from the psychological needs and the therapeutic goals that āde-rolingā techniques address in dramatherapy and psychodrama, this text provides a broader understanding of procedures and exercises that define and ease transitional experiences across cultural practices such as religious rituals and spatial design. After this introductory section, we propose a tentative answer as to why game studies and virtual world research largely ignored processes of ārolingā and āde-rolingā that separate the lived experience of role-play from our everyday sense of the self. The concluding sections argue that de-roling techniques are likely to become more relevant, both academically and in terms of their practical applications, with the growing diffusion of virtual technologies in social practices. The relationships we can establish with ourselves and with our surroundings in digital virtual worlds are, we argue, only partially comparable with similar occurrences in pre-digital practices of subjectification. We propose a perspective according to which the accessibility and immersive phenomenological richness of virtual reality technologies are likely to exacerbate the potentially dissociative effects of virtual reality applications. This text constitutes an initial step towards framing specific socio-technical concerns and starting a timely conversation that binds together dramatherapy, psychodrama, game studies, and the design of digital virtual worlds
Issues in the study of virtual world social movements
Virtual worlds are online three-dimensional worlds that are often constructed to look much like the real world. As more people begin to use these virtual worlds, virtual communities are emerging enabling various social activities and social interactions to be conducted online. Based on a literature review of social movements, virtual communities and virtual worlds, this paper suggests a framework to guide IS research into this new and exciting area
Second Life as a Learning and Teaching Environment for Digital Games Education
Previous studies show that online virtual worlds can contribute to the social aspects of distance learning, improve student engagement, and enhance studentsā experience as a whole [4]; [3]. This paper reviews previous research of using online virtual worlds in teaching and learning,
compares Second Life with traditional classroom sessions and the Blackboard, and discusses the benefits and problems of using virtual environments in the post-sixteen education
and how they affect studentsā learning. It also reports a study of using Second Life as an educational environment for teaching games design at undergraduate level, and investigates the impacts and implications of online virtual
environments on learning and teaching processes and their application to digital games education. The sample was 27 first year students of the Computer Games Modelling and Animation course. Studentsā views on using Second Life for
learning and teaching were collected through a feedback questionnaire. The results suggest that virtual learning environments like Second Life can be exploited as a motivational learning tool. However, problems such as identify issues and lacking of role markers may change student behaviour in virtual classroom. We discuss this
phenomenon and suggest ways to avoid it in the preparation stage
Strategies and challenges to facilitate situated learning in virtual worlds post-Second Life
Virtual worlds can establish a stimulating environment to support a situated learning approach in which students simulate a task within a safe environment. While in previous years Second Life played a major role in providing such a virtual environment, there are now more and more alternativeāoften OpenSim-basedāsolutions deployed within the educational community. By drawing parallels to social networks, we discuss two aspects: how to link individually hosted virtual worlds together in order to implement context for immersion and how to identify and avoid āfakeā avatars so people behind these avatars can be held accountable for their actions
The Problem of Evil in Virtual Worlds
In its original form, Nozickās experience machine serves as a potent counterexample to a simplistic form of hedonism. The pleasurable life offered by the experience machine, its seems safe to say, lacks the requisite depth that many of us find necessary to lead a genuinely worthwhile life. Among other things, the experience machine offers no opportunities to establish meaningful relationships, or to engage in long-term artistic, intellectual, or political projects that survive oneās death. This intuitive objection finds some support in recent research regarding the psychological effects of phenomena such as video games or social media use.
After a brief discussion of these problems, I will consider a variation of the experience machine in which many of these deficits are remedied. In particular, Iāll explore the consequences of a creating a virtual world populated with strongly intelligent AIs with whom users could interact, and that could be engineered to survive the userās death. The presence of these agents would allow for the cultivation of morally significant relationships, and the worldās long-term persistence would help ground possibilities for a meaningful, purposeful life in a way that Nozickās original experience machine could not. While the creation of such a world is obviously beyond the scope of current technology, it represents a natural extension of the existing virtual worlds provided by current video games, and it provides a plausible āideal caseā toward which future virtual worlds will move.
While this improved experience machine would seem to represent progress over Nozickās original, I will argue that it raises a number of new problems stemming from the fact that that the world was created to provide a maximally satisfying and meaningful life for the intended user. This, in turn, raises problems analogous in some ways to the problem(s) of evil faced by theists. In particular, I will suggest that it is precisely those features that would make a world most attractive to potential usersāthe fact that the AIs are genuinely moral agents whose well-being the user can significantly impactāthat render its creation morally problematic, since they require that the AIs inhabiting the world be subject to unnecessary suffering. I will survey the main lines of response to the traditional problem of evil, and will argue that they are irrelevant to this modified case.
I will close by considering by consider what constraints on the future creation of virtual worlds, if any, might serve to allay the concerns identified in the previous discussion. I will argue that, insofar as the creation of such worlds would allow us to meet morally valuable purposes that could not be easily met otherwise, we would be unwise to prohibit it altogether. However, if our processes of creation are to be justified, they must take account of the interests of the moral agents that would come to exist as the result of our world creation
The co-evolution of the āsocialā and the ātechnology": a netnographic study of Social movements in virtual worlds
Virtual worlds provide new forms of social interaction. They offer alternative spaces where social functions can be carried out in online three-dimensional virtual environments. One social phenomenon which has moved into the virtual world is the social movement, which are an important means of bringing out social, cultural and political changes through collective action. These social movements exist in an immersive technological ecosystem which is constantly evolving as designers release patches which change the way users āliveā within these environments. Using a biography of artifacts approach, we explore not just the evolution of the technological artifact itself (the virtual world), but also its co-evolution with the social phenomena (a social movement). Using Netnography, a modified version of ethnography, and actornetwork theory, we explore a social movement in World of Warcraft, and observe how it evolves over time as changes to the virtual world are implemented
From cognitive capability to social reform? Shifting perceptions of learning in immersive virtual worlds
Learning in immersive virtual worlds (simulations and virtual worlds such as Second Life) could become a central learning approach in many curricula, but the socioāpolitical impact of virtual world learning on higher education remains underāresearched. Much of the recent research into learning in immersive virtual worlds centres around games and gaming and is largely underpinned by cognitive learning theories that focus on linearity, problemāsolving and the importance of attaining the āright answerā or game plan. Most research to date has been undertaken into studentsā experiences of virtual learning environments, discussion forums and perspectives about what and how online learning has been implemented. This article reviews the literature relating to learning in immersive virtual worlds, and suggests that there needs to be a reconsideration of what ālearningā means in such spaces
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