Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader

Edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg 

 

Articles linked Here

 

Can You Hear Me Now? The Impact of Voice in an Online Gaming Community

By Dmitri Williams, Scott Caplan, and Li Xiong

 

This paper reports the results of a controlled field experiment in which voice communication was introduced into an existing online community (an online gaming guild within the popular game “World of Warcraft”), comparing a mix of voice and text with text only. Quantitative results suggest increases in liking and trust due to the addition of voice, as well as insulation from unexpected negative impacts of text-only play. The findings are discussed with respect to social capital, cyberbalkanization and the general computer-mediated communication literature, with special attention paid to SIP theory.

 

Who plays, how much and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile

by Williams, D., N. Yee & S. Caplan

(in press at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication)

 

Online games have exploded in popularity, but for many researchers access to players has been difficult. The study reported here is the first to collect a combination of survey and behavioral data with the cooperation of a major virtual world operator. In the current study, 7,000 players of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) EverQuest 2 were surveyed about their offline characteristics, their motivations and their physical and mental health. These self-report data were then combined with data on participants’ actual in-game play behaviors, as collected by the game operator. Most of the results defy common stereotypes in surprising and interesting ways and have implications for communication theory and for future investigations of games.

 

Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft

By Bonnie A. Nardi, Stella Ly, and Justin Harris

 

We examine learning culture in a popular online game, World of Warcraft. We analyze the way players learn this complex game through chat

conversation with peers. We describe three kinds of learning: fact finding, devising tactics/strategy, and acquiring game ethos. We

investigate learning in the zone of proximal development as specified in cultural-historical activity theory. We examine the emotional tenor

of learning conversations, noting their drama, humor, and intimacy.

 

Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft

By Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris

 

We analyze collaborative play in an online video game, World of Warcraft, the most popular personal computer game in the United States, with significant markets in Asia and Europe. Based on an immersive ethnographic study, we describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players’ enjoyment and learning of the game. We discovered that play is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations

from brief informal encounters to highly organized play in structured groups. The variety of collaborations makes the game more fun and provides rich learning opportunities. We contrast these varied collaborations, including those with strangers, to the “gold standard” of Gemeinschaft-like communities of close relations in tightknit groups. We suggest populations for whom similar games could be designed.

 

Special Issue of Games and Culture

 

Tanya Krzywinska and Henry Lowood

Guest Editors' Introduction

Games and Culture 2006 1: 279-280.  

 

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore

Building an MMO With Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft

Games and Culture 2006 1: 281-317.  

 

T. L. Taylor

Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause

Games and Culture 2006 1: 318-337.  

 

Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell

From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft

Games and Culture 2006 1: 338-361.  

 

Henry Lowood

Storyline, Dance/Music, or PvP?: Game Movies and Community Players in World of Warcraft

Games and Culture 2006 1: 362-382.  

 

Tanya Krzywinska

Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests, and Backstories: World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft

Games and Culture 2006 1: 383-396. 

 

Torill Elvira Mortensen

WoW is the New MUD: Social Gaming from Text to Video

Games and Culture 2006 1: 397-413.

 

Other Articles

 

William Sims Bainbridge

The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds

Science 2007 317 27 (July 27): 472-476.

 

William Sims Bainbridge, Wilma Alice Bainbridge

Electronic Game Research Methologies

Review of Religious Research 2007 49 1: 35-53.

 

Chen, M. (in press).

Communication, coordination, and camaraderie in World of Warcraft.

Games and Culture.

 

Lowood, Henry

It’s Not Easy Being Green: Real-Time Game Performance in Warcraft.

In: Videogame/Player/Text, eds. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester Univ. Press; New York: Palgrave, 2007): 83-100.

 

See also: Working Papers

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