WoW Guilds:A Community of Practice

Ruy CervantesRuy Cervantes

Satyajit DasSatyajit DasDwight LeeDwight Lee

Yong Ming KowYong Ming Kow

Online Gaming• MMORPG

• Global in nature, culture

• Players (adults, kids, teachers, etc)

• Game play

• Realm

– PvE

– PvP

– RP

– RP-PvP

• Forms a virtual community

– Play alone

– Play within small groups (1-10 raids)

– Play with large groups (11- 100+ guilds)

Characteristics of the game

• WoW

• Role / Professions in the game - (Tailor, mining, cooking,

engineering etc.)

• Race (Humans, Dwarves, Orcs, Elves, etc.)

• Two warring factions - Alliance and Hordes

• Quests, Instances, Dungeons and Raids

• Progress in the game

• Collaboration (Friends and Strangers)

• Player interaction medium (“In” & “Out”)

The Game

VIDEO TIME!! (start 4:57)

What is a Community of Practice (CoP)?

• “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” - Etienne Wenger

• Legitimate Peripheral Participation

• Tension in dualities– Local vs. Global– Designed vs. Emergent– Participation vs. Reification– Identification vs. Negotiability

Local vs. Global

• “No community can fully design the learning of another” and “No community can fully design its own learning” (Wenger 99, 234).

• In the process of organizing its learning, a community must have access to other practices (Wenger 99, 234).

• For example: groups in a software development process (systems, software, verification, management, SQA, etc).

Designed vs. Emergent

• “There is an inherent uncertainty between design and its realization in practice, since practice is not the result of design, but rather a response to it.” (Wenger 99, 233)

• For example, pagers were designed signal the holder to call a certain number. However, what happened in addition to that was that people began to use numbers to spell out words and sentences.

Participation vs. Reification

• Negotiation of meaning

“Design for practice is always distributed between participation and

reification - and its realization depends on how these two fit

together.”• Participation is social experience of living in the world in terms of

membership in social communities and active involvement in social enterprises.

• Reification The tool to perform the action.

Ex: A painting reifies the perception of the world, an understanding.

“A book can be used to gain knowledge by a group of students referring it but each student will have their own understanding of the subject and internalize it as their own tacit knowledge”

Identification vs. Negotiability• Identity in a community “We identify with a community and conversely recognized as a member of

the community”

• Identification is providing experiences and material for building identities through an investment of the self in relations of association and differentiation.

• Negotiability refers to the ability, facility and legitimacy to contribute to take responsibility for and shape the meanings that matter within the social configuration

WoW as a CoP

• Dualities in WoW

• Several CoP in WoW

– Overall Game

– Ad Hoc Groups

– Beginner Guild

– Casual Guild

– Hardcore Guild

• Social, Trading, PvP, Raiding

Guilds

• What is a Guild?

• Guild as a community

• Recruitment process and formation

• Benefits in a Guild

• Guild Size

• How useful you are to the guild?

• Guild structure and power

• Skill trade, guild bank

• Reward structure and ranks in Guilds

• Guild Behavior

Types of Guilds

• Casual

– New born – All are welcome

– Toddler – Development of policies

– Teenage – Enforcement of policies

– Adulthood – Clear organization

– Coming of age – PvP and Raids

• Hardcore

• Expectation/Commitment

• Maturity

Why a Guild is a CoP

• Participation vs. Reification– learning the game – looting

• Merit vs. DKP system• Designed vs. Emergent

– Admission into:• Casual guild• Hardcore guild

• Identification vs. Negotiability – Acceptable Behavior

• Local vs. Global– CoP of officers will affect the guild

Behavior of players that cannot be explained by the framework

• Joining and leaving a guild

– Want to advance into the game

– Burning out

• Change of life patterns

– Social commitments

Importance of Intention in Behavior

• Identity cannot explain intentionality – Identity is a social construct– STS need to understand historical and subjective perspective

(Kallinikos).• Identity is formed historically and motivated subjectively• The bridge for these can be Activity Theory

– Looks at the development of an activity in a historical perspective– Understands how the subject affects the overall activity– But it does not explain fully the formation of motives

• Complement with other theories like Psychoanalysis or Schema theory?

Discussion