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.