Also, here is the poster for my final design:

WoW Capture: HCI/d Master's Capstone

That being said, I now present a brief overview of my capstone project and some of the theoretical stuff informing it.

INTRO
This project seeks to design a system that preserve the experience of virtual worlds, in this case World of Warcraft outside of the through the use of screenshots and metadata. The design aims to give players some out-of-game representation of their experience in the game.

By providing players with a persistent, meaningful representation of their time investment, the design will address issues in MMORPG design and with human-computer interaction design. First, it address the three issues outlined here in a human-centered way. Second, it will enhance the entertainment value of MMORPGs by suggesting new ways to understand and design for the “goals” of the game. This could be especially important for aging games like World of Warcraft, where the company wants to provide new experiences for old players and bring in new players, but the majority of players are only concerned with “end game” content. Third, it could attract an even more diverse player base to MMORPGs by focusing on less-emphasized groups, mainly those that might be labeled as “casual” or “atypical” players. Finally, in a broader sense this project will help initiate a sorely needed conversation between the field of human-computer interaction design and the are of MMORPG design.

Some o’ that academic-y stuff

Persistence and Ephemerality
The main source of inspiration for this design project comes from Lindtner and Nardi who discuss “possibilities for new design spaces and forms of interaction with digital media” with regards to persistence and ephemerality. The main argument of my design thus far, and the main argument of this paper are one and the same. It is summed up best by the authors of the paper:

“Ephemeral conversations are beneficial to highlighting certain specific artifacts and making them more meaningful in everyday use…A common characterization of persistent conversation is that it facilitates reflection and recontextualization of past and remote activities, leaving traces for later use.”

Artifacts that help World of Warcraft players to reflect and recontexualize their past and ongoing experiences could provide more meaningful gameplay and social experiences. The authors described several ways in which people use persistent artifacts to represent parts of the ephemeral experience, and even provide an example of how World of Warcraft does this with the Armory. The game experience of World of Warcraft is ephemeral, and there is much more design work to be done to create artifacts that capture this is a meaningful way. However, one of the challenges of doing this well is due to the sheer volume of data that is collected by digital systems and media. As the authors put it: isn’t easy to “weave the ephemeral and the persistent.”

A key issue and opportunity in designing for spaces like World of Warcraft comes about because “digital media often afford large quantities of data, but without making transparent to the user how to highlight values and meanings of the data.” This stands in stark contrast to the ways in which people typically make meaning of their experiences.

The example given of the World of Warcraft Armory shows one way that the game designers use data to represent the game experience. However, this artifact reduces the player to a representation of statistics and armor, which while useful and meaningful in certain ways to players is not a robust representation of other types of meaning.

World of Warcraft as a Cultural Interface
Manovich’s concept of “cultural interfaces” is important to World of Warcraft when you consider that players spend a lot of time in the game world. From my own experience playing MMORPGs, my friendship with several players, and interviews I have found that play times vary greatly, ranging from 10 – 30 hours usually but can often exceed 30. This doesn’t even account for the additional time spent on the screen interacting with other World of Warcraft spaces such as guild and game forums and various other informational resources.

Tyler Pace, using Nakamura’s concept of cybertypes found that embedded values in World of Warcaft races are often facilitating negative connotations on non-white races. He even found that players themselves associate real life races with virtual races, often times with negative results. Another example of how World of Warcraft is embedded with cultural data comes from the participants in one of Lindtner et als’ study of World of Warcraft players in China. In this study, a player in China stated that he “learned several things from about the West…their dragons are different than ours. Western dragons are evil while Chinese dragons stand for happiness.”

These are just two examples of the many levels of embedded cultural data in World of Warcraft, which has been further investigated by Pace and others authors. Game designers have already become aware of some of the obvious negative connotations and have made changes, most notably how the image of a skeleton was replaced with a tombstone for Chinese players whose character dies.

Transmedia
Particularly relevant to an understanding of this space comes from Jen Terrell’s synthesis of “transmedia” using the work of several new media authors. In the following I take her synthesis as inspiration and describe its relevance to World of Warcraft and to my particular capstone design direction.

Henry Jenkins uses the term “transmedia storytelling” to discuss the way narratives are constructed across several types of media. He states, “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.” This is especially applicable to online spaces like World of Warcraft, where meaning is constructed via the game, the self-selected groups of players, and the various online sources used to share advice, stories, and other forms of information about the game and game culture. Transmediated worlds across multiple online and offline media and conversations, and while at times are virtual, their “virtualness” is just as “real” as the offline, geographically-defined world.

Another important concept from Jenkins that will be explored in my exemplar study is the notion of “textual poachers.” Jenkins argues that in the process of appropriating texts fans cease to be passive consumers and become active producers of texts and of new understandings of old texts. When World of Warcraft players create artifacts such as fan fiction, art, videos, costumes, etc. they are actively continuing the narratives they have appropriated, and are creating new narratives. Dena says that in games like World of Warcraft players create the actual game content themselves as they fill in gaps that are intentionally left by the original textual authors, in this case the game designers.

Terrell says that “The way that fans are able to move from consumer toward producer is through interaction with texts, technology and each other. Interactivity is a vital part of this transition – it is the interaction itself, the appropriation of media texts and the act of sharing newly produced texts that empower a fan. The empowerment of fans, and by extension cultural producers in general, is a crucial component in the transition from passive consumer to active producer.”

I take this as meaning that essentially if we want to design good stuff for World of Warcraft, it needs to enable players to make their own meanings and produce texts. This subsequently leads to the understanding that navigation through new media requires complex media and technological literacy. Apperley says that “Transmedia storytelling suggests a new kind of literacy, which does not only involve the knowledge of multiple media forms but also [of] the integration of media from these disparate sources.”

Moving Forward
In summary, these three main categories of research helped inform other literature that has been and will be examined as well as a general design direction. If I can design something that uses the volume of digital information that represents the ephemerality of World of Warcraft in a persistent way I can help players reflect and create their own meaning, perhaps helping them to address or make explicit the issues of transcoding and cybertypes. Additionally I can draw inspiration from new media theory, particularly notions of empowering World of Warcraft players to construct transmedia narratives and subsequently new meaningful interactions.

In making my thoughts and assumptions explicit, I have very strong opinions about how World of Warcraft favors certain playstyles over others.  I feel that the design and “loudest” player groups have created a game culture that favors ambition, aggressiveness, and a focus on certain achievements over others.  (Warning: The following sentence might be highly subjective or half-baked).  High level or “epic/elite” activities, raiding, or player vs. player are seen as “better” than any-level activities like exploration, pet collection, or crafting.  While these any-level activities are not seen as unimportant, they don’t have near the prestige of the other activities, and are often treated as a means to an end.

After my first attempt at doing a semiotic reading of the FigurePrints service, I have a vague sense of a thesis.  This is something along the lines of: The FigurePrints interaction favors dominant, aggressive, and high-level players over players that are low-level or less concerned with aggressive or competitive play.

I begin with a statement about what the figure itself represents.  It is a text that represents the player’s time investment, their attachment to the character and the character’s place in the history of the game lore, the character’s (and player’s) growth over time, the character (and player’s) growth in a larger social context of friends and other players in the game, and on and on.  It is a text of rich and personal meaning, and the choices that FigurePrints provides limit players to only certain kinds of meaning.  I will illustrate this with a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the choices provided to players in the creation of the figure.

Syntagmatically-speaking, the creation of the FigurePrints statue consists of choosing from a Pose, a Base, and a set of Armor.

I think I need to explore the importance of limiting players to these 3 choices, but as of yet I haven’t analyzed it that much.  However, I currently can adequately speak about what each of these paradigms represent and what choices are given.

Pose as a representation of body language

Players can choose from 44 different poses, 33 of which involve the use of a weapon and depict the character in battle.  This leaves 11 poses that could reflect the character out of battle.  Of these 11 poses, 5 are gestures that depict behavior that is aggressive or negative in the culture of World of Warcraft.  There are the character poses of yell, chicken (taunt), rude (making an obscene gesture), train (a gesture that represents a despised activity in which a player or players, on purpose or on accident, lead a large group of monsters to another player resulting in chaos, game lag, and death), and beg (perhaps an even more despised behavior than a monster train).

The remaining 6 poses are stand, walk, wave, kiss, kneel, and sit.  Out of 44 possible representations of body language, this seems to be a very limited range of choices for creating a character figure that is NOT fighting or calling attention to the negative cultural aspects of the game.  Granted, the game is called World of WARcraft, not the World of Politeness and Compromise.  However, there is much more to a player’s character and gameplay than fighting.  Players engage in arguably more social/helpful scenarios than they do in fighting, and they collect plants, mine for metals, go fishing, craft items, and engage with storylines.  But there are no poses for any of these.

Base as a representation of [something]. < I don’t know what to put here yet.  It is a symbol of elevated status, of standing on top of something, of being built upon something.  I don’t know.  Anyway:

There are 4 choices of statue bases:

Marbled Floor: The “plainest” of all the bases, but represents a material of luxury and importance.

Horned Stand: Horns are aggressive, bestial, and associated with violence

Gold Mound: wealth, greed, achievement

Onyxia Base: This one is interesting in that it cost an extra $10, perhaps due to printing constraints.  However, more cost is usually associated with a “premium” or “superior” product, which in this case is the base that represents a large, epic battle against a dragon.  This particular battle is a well-known (relatively-speaking) raid in World of Warcraft, and is sort of a rite of passage for players that begin raiding.  Here the “premium” product is reserved for players concerned with raiding.

What is missing from this assortment of bases is the choice to have your character standing in a meadow, or at a crafting station, or near a fishing hole, all of which are places that exist in the game and can have very special meanings for players.

Armor as a representation of fashion and achievement

Choices of armor are limited to the armor you have actually collected in the game.  In the analysis I did, a level 80 character that has done many raids and player vs. player fights has 10 armor options as opposed to a level 20 character who has 3.  Additionally, 2 of these options are for Christmas outfits that every player has access to.  If you remove those options the armor choices are 8 to 1 in favor of the player that engages with game activities that reward players with special armor.

As I mentioned before, there are an incredible amount of activities that players can engage with.  Players can follow the storyline, harvest materials, craft items, play the stock-market on the auction house, explore the game world, collect pets, teach other players how to play, help out other players with difficult situations, make new friends, and on and on.  However, these activities in themselves are not rewarded with special sets of armor.  Special sets of armor are reserved for players that engage with high-level game content, and are successful in killing “epic” monsters, or defeating other players in tournaments.

Since FigurePrints only allows players to “dress” their character in the armor they have acquired in the game, this places a much higher value on high-level players concerned with raids and player vs. player activities.  This is most evident in the words used in the instructions:

These are the instructions shown to all players, regardless of if they have 8 sets of high-level armor to choose from or 1 low-level set of armor.

Any player without high-level armor could be described as either not interested in those aspects of the game that provide the armor, or as not “advanced” enough to have acquired it.  By not providing this player with as many options to “dress” the character, the player is limited in the ways he or she can create a meaningful representation of his or her character.

FigurePrints situated amongst other texts

And then I can also talk about FigurePrints as a creative activity concerned with creating an artifact that represents the player’s character.  In seeing FigurePrints as this, I can compare it to many other artifacts that are created to represent the character:  costumes, drawings, forum signatures, fan fiction, and the WoW Armory just to name a few.  In exploring these artifacts, I have seen an interesting occurrence: artifacts that are created from scratch by players have very different qualities than artifacts that are generated using information from the game.

Some future design implications?

Namely, game-generated artifacts seem to focus on achievements, statistics, armor, and items.  Player-generated artifacts seem to focus on personal stories and social elements.  Some of this is discussed by Silvia Lindtner, Bonnie Nardi, and Fernanda Viégas.  This will be more important in the future as representations based on digital data become a source for decision-making.  If social spaces like World of Warcraft use their digital data to reduce the rich experience down to statistics and equipment, what implications does that have for the ways in which we value others and ourselves?
EDIT: January 4, 2010.  Since first posting this, I have developed these thoughts more and have written several drafts of this paper.  It is currently a work in progress.

The transformative powers of repeated viewings were incredible. I had entirely different experiences when I viewed the game through different phenomenological perspectives. The first time I saw it as just a MMORPG player. When I first watched this video, I was distracted by the medium. All I saw was World of Warcraft characters, and attached to them every stereotype and bias that exists about World of Warcraft players, my understanding of the culture of MMORPGs, and the pop culture phenomenon that is the game.

However, after repeated viewings the “World of Warcraft-ness” started to fade away, and I realized that this video is very compelling. The second time I saw it as Chad with my particular history of knowing people who have died and the beginnings and endings of relationships in my life. I even noticed that when I was writing my notes from watching the video, I never referred to the character in the video as “he” or “him.” I kept writing the word “I” or “me.” That was quite a powerful realization.

Then I started reading the various comments and I saw someone who said it reminded him of when his mom was killed by a drunk driver. In my next viewing I pretended that my mom had been killed by a drunk driver, and I was surprised (and a little frightened) at how easily I was able to envision that scenario. Throughout all of these viewings I felt real, genuine pain. It grew even worse when I kept reading the comments about all the other types of loss that people associated with the video: breaking up, moving away, death of a loved one, losing touch with a childhood friend, someone cheating on someone else, or watching a sick relative slowly get sicker.

The sadness and tragedy of life were made even clearer by the insensitive and frankly assholish comments that are interspersed amongst the genuine comments. For every heartfelt comment there is another where someone is making fun of anyone who got something out of a “stupid video game.” There is much to be said here about internet culture, how machinima is viewed amongst other forms of expression, or how this particular video is grouped in with funny and ridiculous other WoW-inspired machinima. But that is the structuralist and semiotic stuff for later.

With all my new lenses for looking at things, I am slightly overwhelmed with things that I can say about this video, not least of which is that this video is definitely not what Blizzard had in mind when they created World of Warcraft.  But I have come to an interesting realization recently, and it is this: It isn’t our ability to say all these things that is valuable. It is the fact that we have noticed new things and in doing so are able to have richer experiences.

• Clear sketches lead to clearer communication.  Both my knowledge of what sketching can do for me as a language of thought, and my abilities to sketch what I am thinking still need some serious work.  This is something that I have been putting further effort into practicing.
• Personas are a great tool when you can’t do in-depth interviews, ethnography, and contextual research.  They obviously can’t truly stand in for a real person, but they can still be helpful.  Also, any of the designer’s tools (in this case personas), can be put to use in slightly different ways depending on the designer, the company, and the context.
• It isn’t necessary to add more features to accomplish design goals.  We incorporated many features in an attempt to change behavior instead of adapting the design to fit with existing behavior.  For instance we might have let the user turn the thermostat way up or down, but have the thermostat keep the temperature within acceptable ranges.
• High-fidelity prototypes can make it more difficult to get proper feedback.  We did ourselves, our design, and our users a disservice by going straight from concept to high-fidelity prototype.  If we had used a low-fidelity prototype we could have helped our test participants to focus on the concept of the design instead of the little details, and ensured that they were less inclined to hold back criticism.