Paper Reading #4: Can a Community of Players be a Community of Practice

Reference Information

Jodi Asbell-Clarke and Elisabeth Sylvan. "Martian Boneyards: Can a Community of Players be a Community of Practice." Educational Gaming Environments, 05 May 2012. Web. 05 Sept. 2012.

Authors

Jodi Asbell-Slarke: Works at Educational Gaming Environments in the EdGE division.
Elisabeth Sylvan: Works at Educational Gaming Environments in the EdGE division as well.

Article Summary

Photo Credit: Case Study

This article focused on the effects a virtual community had on the players it cased. The the two author's case study worked on a game called Martian Boneyards, an experimental MMO game, and took a deeper look into the community of players itself. The designers of the game were mixed among the players themselves and set up a reward system as well for collaborating among the members in the game.

The game was modeled to closely relate to real life scenarios and skill sets. There were scientists, hunters, students, and even a pool of random volunteers. In the game, academic and accomplishments in skills were rewarded by visual enhancements. New players were shown to be drawn to the players with the most visual prowess, hopeful in being able to solve their need of leveling up their own characters.

The authors found that many interesting questions were brought up by users and found that the questions were separated by the type of person they actually were in real life. They found that many of the scientific questions and theories were largely popular with the science community and had a direct correlation with even their avatar type.

Related Work

A few related pieces of work were found on the effects a virtual.community had on a user.

• Pat Gannon-Leary, Elsa Fontainha. Communities of Practice and Virtual Learning
• Karen Swan, Peter J. Shea. The Development of Virtual Learning Communities
• Amrit Tiwana, Ashley Bush. Peer to Peer Valuation as a Machanism for Active Learning
• Computing Research Association. Cyberinfrastructure for Education. Learning for the Future
• Karen Swan. Relationships Between Interactions and Learning In Online Environments
• Gerhard Fischer, Masonori Sugimoto. Supporting Self-Directed Learning and Learning Communities with Sociotechnical Environments
• Joseph Tront, Brandon Muramatsu. A Community to Develop Materials for an Engineering Learning Environment
• Ruth E Brown. The Process of Community Building In Distance Learning Classes
• Linnea Carlson-Sabelli, Lous Fogg. The effect of a Virtual Community on Work-Life, Recruitment, and Retension among Nursing Faculty.
• Bunchball. An Introduction to the Use of Game Dynamics to Influence Behavior

Most of the above papers talk about the effect a virtual environment has on a specific community of academics.

Evaluation

The authors used very qualitative descriptions to talk about the experiences the users had within the community. Many users were described subjectively in groups such as scientists and engineers. The scientists usually felt a specific way towards something while the other types of users felt an entirely different way. The interests they talked about the users having taking a liking to were usually discussed subjectively by the users themselves. The designers took a far-away approach and listened to everything the users had brought up when being talked to. They tried to stay as objective as possible.

Discussion

The authors didn't look at the effects the game's community could have in today's world, but instead looked at the potential the game could have on the future. In the future, it's expected that virtual avatars would be a thing of common practice. With the increase in technology and the increasing desire for social experience, mixing a rewarding virtual community with the future could produce promising results.

I think in the future, virtual communities will be big practices and the largest communities will probably be the most popular. Taking advantage of that for the use of academics is a area I feel strongly about. I would be proud to be a part of developing that if I had to do that in the future.