WoW Learning

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Thanks,
Michelle

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Joy of Stats Book Cover

I have been working recently on importing data into SPSS from the first part of my April survey on World of Warcraft motivations. This has been a fairly straightforward process for the most part. The exception is the last question about the respondent’s guild type and purpose. The question was presented as the following:

In a short sentence (140 characters), describe the primary purpose of the guild in which you spend most of your time, or enter “no guild”.

Example: I’m in a social guild that believes in random acts of kindness. We love to dance but we also raid end-game content with other casual guilds.

I am not happy with how the coding for the type and purpose is going. When I created the SPSS codebook for that part of the survey, I initially broke it down into two parts: a type and a primary purpose. The type represented a breakdown primarily between “social” and “hardcore”. The purpose could be a key activity or a purpose. The divisions were chosen based on an an initial review of the received responses (see Table 1).

The “No guild” choice is self-evident. “Not codable” was intended for responses like “Forks” or “I am an herbalist in my guild”. This was usually where the respondent had not answered the question correctly, so no type or purpose could be determined. “No identifiable activity” was intended for responses like “Social”, where no obvious activity was ascertainable.

Andrew and I independently coded the 51 responses according to type and activity. We were allowed to use general knowledge about World of Warcraft but not specific knowledge about any guilds or people if identifiable somehow from the response. The response itself had to dictate the type and purpose.

We almost completely agreed on “type”, but we disagreed by about 28% on the “activity”. If an answer mentioned raiding and that seemed more key than anything else included (or nothing else was included), I coded it as “raiding”. Andrew often coded it as “fun” because he felt the raiding was deprecated or a lesser part even if it was the only thing mentioned. So, for example, if someone said something like “I’m in a social guild and we also do some raiding”, Andrew coded that as “fun”, because the “also raid” was a lesser thing, whereas I would have said “raiding”.

To fix that, he suggested that we add a category that indicated the amount of raiding. I would then have “raiding” and “some raiding”. That seemed sensible, but then left the question of what the “primary” purpose of the guild was if “some raiding” was ancillary. While the survey specifically asked for the primary purpose, but many of the responses, likely because of the poorly chosen example, included one or more activities. When coding, that meant the coder had to pick the one activity that seemed most prominent.

A colleague, in discussion about the first attempt at coding, suggested going for as wide a range of activities as possible before cutting back. I had, for example, initially omitted “performing random acts of kindness”, which occurred fairly often, as an activity. She thought that should be added as well as “social.” Social” as an activity was omitted because I was using the “social” designator appearing in responses to code for the guild type. However, in retrospect, it occurred to me it would be even more appropriate if I changed the guild type to be as interpreted by me based on my assessment of the respondent’s answer; the question did not ask the respondent to specify their guild type but to describe the purpose. I need to stay true to the question’s intent.

A modified codebook then would look something like Table 2.

That does mean that I need more formal definitions of “social”, “hardcore”, and “casual” then to use for the coding guild type. It also means there is a question about how many activities to code, given that very few responses only mentioned one purpose or activity. While the question did ask for a primary activity, I do not have a problem per se with coding for more activities. The questions are then: how many and should order be significant?

Open Issues for Comment and Resolution

• Is the second draft draft more sane in terms of how type and activity are determined in general?
• What are some existing formal definitions of guild types that can be used?
• How many purposes or activities should be coded?
• If multiple activities or purposes are coded, is the order significant? That is, should I assume that the first thing mentioned is the most important, the second, the next, and so on?

Any opinions or help are appreciated, as this type of analysis is new to me.

As part of a course under development at The Open University, I was approached as a known World of Warcraft player and asked to write a short paragraph or two on why I play World of Warcraft. I freely admit to failing to only write a short paragraph or two, but that’s probably because I’m passionate about World of Warcraft and my activities in it, especially given the prominence it plays in my life in so many areas. Read on to find out why I play World of Warcraft.

This article was originally posted at E1n1verse on August 4, 2009 as World of Warcraft and Me: A True Confession

Elsheindra (me)

Hello, my name is Michelle Hoyle. By day, I’m a respectable Open University course author, associate lecturer, and course presentation chair. At night, I assume my secret identity: Elsheindra, night elf guild mistress of The One on a European World of Warcraft (WoW) server. You’re probably thinking that massively multiple online role playing games (MMORPGs), like WoW, are just for kids. In fact, according to research (Lenhart et al, 2008; Yee, 2008), only about 20% of WoW players are between the ages of 12 to 19. That means some 80% of players are solid, upstanding citizens of the world. They could be your tutors. They could be your next door neighbours. They could be that person you see walking down the street or buying beef at the butcher’s. World of Warcraft, as of May 2009, was holding steady at 11.5 million active subscribers (Blandeburgo, 2009; Chuang, 2009). That’s over 60% of the online gaming market. It’s the most successful personal computer game ever to be released.

What is it that compels these people to spend around 20 to 24 hours a week (Hagel and Brown, 2009; Yee, 2005) in a virtual world? Is it the killing? Is it the girls? Is it the beautiful scenery? Is it the fantastic fashions? People’s motivations vary, so I can’t give you a universal motivation, but I can reveal something about why I play. I play for three reasons: because I’m a community builder, because I’m a teacher, and because I love to help people. They’re all a bit related. I have spent my life bringing people together and helping them form cohesive, long-lasting communities. It started back in the 1980s with electronic bulletin boards and continues today with World of Warcraft. That’s why I run a guild and co-lead an alliance of guilds.

A guild in World of Warcraft is a collection of people who share things in common. The game gives them some tools for sharing, like a shared chat area, calendar, and a bank in which to store money or items for common use. They usually share a philosophy. My guild, for example, is a social guild with a philosophy of doing random acts of kindness. An allied guild is composed of people together for friendship or fun. When my guild members aren’t out being kind to the other 4000 people on the server, they have each other to group with on small tasks, called quests, like curing sick deer or ridding an area of nasty rabid bears. A guild is also a pool of people with which to go on longer adventures in groups of five for rewards like armour and gold in mazelike environments where there are obstacles to overcome and difficult, large monsters to kill—so-called dungeons. The alliance of guilds I help lead allows smaller social-minded guilds like mine to be able to participate in even larger, more complex adventures that require 10, 25, or 40 people at a time. It is very rewarding to be in a position to enable people to have fun, but at the same time promote learning of important social interaction and problem solving skills.

Where does the learning come from? The learning is, in fact, everywhere in the game. Those 5-person dungeon groups or the larger 25-person groups require leaders to decide on strategy and direct the other people with varied motivations. Some people go to these dungeons only to get better gear. That’s their motivation. Other people go for the feeling of accomplishment in participating in something difficult. When people are there for gear, there can be clashes over who should get it, which requires good interpersonal relationship skills and diplomacy on the part of the group leader. In our guild alliance, we’ve had leaders good at strategy and telling people what to do but with terrible interpersonal skills. That made their adventures not very fun, so people were reluctant to participate. Likewise, running a successful guild over a long period of time requires all manner of leadership and diplomacy skills. WoW is a safe, low-risk environment in which to learn these things and they can transfer into real-world rewards (Brown and Thomas, 2006).

Elsheindra as a healing tree

In order to contribute to a team effectively, people need to learn to play their characters well. Each character has specific abilities. Elsheindra, my character, is a druid healer. She cures people of diseases and poisons and heal their bodies of damage they have taken while fighting. I’ve specialized in being a healer for over four years. I’ve become really, really good at healing by dint of lots of practice and much analysis of how things work. I have pride in my abilities and I love being able to help people in the game in a non-violent fashion, because I was not much interested in hacking and slashing at things. Other people are extremely interested in effectively killing things and devote hours outside of the game to reading about their character’s role and how to improve on it, often in very tiny increments. I’m very willing to share my knowledge and experience with other people and often other very good players are too.

I’ve told you a lot about what kinds of things I do in World of Warcraft and my initial motivations. What I haven’t told you are the things I’ve gained: love, acceptance, friendship, and a Ph.D. project, in order of importance. I’m currently researching what elements in games like WoW contribute to motivation and whether or not that can be transferred effectively into distance learning (Hoyle, 2009a; 2009b). Both feature activities that are a lot of work and, let’s face it, aren’t fun. In World of Warcraft, though, people persist with these difficult, not-fun tasks. I know I’ve persisted in some things because of the friends I’ve made. Those friendships have even transcended the virtual world, with people helping me move from apartment to apartment multiple times, even though they live in a different city.

Basil, my partner

The alliance of guilds I co-run just had a real-life adventure at Bletchley Park and a BBQ at my house afterwards, one of several such successful large-scale events over the years. It’s also not uncommon for some of my guild mates to just come and visit from other parts of the UK or from other countries. One of my guild mates even came along from Denmark to Canada for the summer. Are we just strange misfits? That’s a common perception of gamers. I don’t fit in lots of places but in WoW there’s a place for me, as there is for them, and it’s not just because “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. Finally, “Basil”, my real-life partner, is someone I met in WoW because he was helping me co-lead the alliance of guilds. We’ve been together for over two and a half years. We still play WoW together on a regular basis, although not 20 some hours a week. There’s nothing like a romantic date night with your beloved and 23 other friends.

WoW is like a fairy tale: magic, dragons, true love, fashion, elves, and orcs; but it’s also what I’ve made of it: a place to be myself and to do the things I love to do.

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