Don’t get me wrong – I am not angry because I am naive about virtual worlds and their economies. As matter of fact I am fascinated by real money trade in virtual worlds, and I understand economics well enough to see that real money trade is not only an inevitable facet of virtual worlds, but is in some ways a beneficial one. Having attended Indiana University, I have even had the pleasure of sitting down with Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, and who was mentioned several times in Dibbell’s book. And I agree with both of those guys that the production and trade of virtual goods should be viewed more seriously as a legitimate economy. However, because of this I also think that people who hack and exploit code in order to make money should face harsher consequences that just having an account banned.

But when it comes to this book I am disappointed in Julian Dibbell. Sure, he spent a lot of time learning a lot of very interesting things about virtual economies and working to shine a light on the whole phenomenon. Now I am not trying to crucify Dibbell here, and if he ever reads this I don’t mean for this to sound offensive towards him. But during his self-experiment with learning to make money in Ultima Online, he made partnerships and deals with dishonest people, and engaged in activities that negatively affected a lot of people – glorifying them for reasons I can’t understand. The fact is, for all the heralding of this grand new virtual space where currencies and economies are more democratic and we inch closer to bridging the digital divide – the people who end up at the top of the food chain do so by breaking the rules and negatively affecting other people’s experience. When I say rules, I am not talking about “user agreements” – we all know that the logic and fairness of these are shaky at best. I am talking about real money traders who hack the code, exploit unintended game mechanics, and run bots to create their product.

Dibbell even mentions that virtual world economies don’t work on the same rules of supply and demand that “real world” economies do. However, the main reason for this isn’t because of some new branch of economics that the world has been blessed with now that technology has given us virtual worlds – it is because of people who break the integrity of the game world for their own monetary gain. What would we do in the “real world” if someone actually figured out a way to turn lead into gold? I bet we wouldn’t let them set up a website and hire young people in China to dig up lead for them.

And this is the main reason why I will never play MMORPGs again: Currently, real money trading ruins the integrity of the game space. I remember back when I played Final Fantasy XI, and my friend and I loved going around and farming for resources to sell on the in-game auction house. However, because the real money traders in the game had so successfully figured out how to generate income they inflated the economy to a point where it took us months to farm enough money to buy the items we needed to proceed. We couldn’t hunt a monster or farm for resources without running into gold-farming bots. I don’t mind if someone is making money off of the game, but when gold farming bots are preventing players from making any money in the game, that is wrong. When a gold-selling company holds 90% of a virtual economy’s currency, that is wrong. When players must compete with trained employees of gold-farming companies who don’t care about interfering with the game experience, that is wrong.

I know the gaming industry is concerned about this stuff, but I don’t think they are nearly concerned enough. The websites that sell gold, items, and accounts only make money by exploiting things in the game to the detriment of the game economy and the experience of people who actually want to play the game and interact with other players. The mafia-style business antics detailed in Dibbell’s book loom on the horizon, providing a very disenchanting vision of the future of our digital lives. It will be interesting to see if eventually the IRS, law enforcement agencies, and the game companies that provide these games will start treating the trade of virtual goods seriously – and criminalize resource production methods that disrupt the integrity of the game space.

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.

It also seems to me that speaking of design as a shaper of behavior or rhetoric puts the emphasis on the wrong place for most practical industrial or interaction design work. I guess I align more with Christopher Alexander’s approach in Notes on the Synthesis of Form and A Timeless Way of Building–that what we design should fit, not so much change or shape, the way people already behave or want to behave, and it should only be rhetorical if put to ends that align with the good of those being designed for.

Thank you J. Ambrose Little.  People come first.  Our values as designers will undoubtedly manifest themselves in our work, but we design things, not behavior.  We can only design for behavior.  Now I gotta go read Jon’s book.

It is sometimes thought that interpreting images of functional artefacts, such as a food processor or digital camera, is easier than interpreting works of fine art, be they painted, sculpted, photographed, or otherwise. At least the utilitarian, functional dimensions of the artefacts might provide a common basis for understanding. Without any comparable basis in the practical, fine art artefacts are judged to be far less contained.

Are the words functional, utilitarian, and practical problematic here?  And what do these descriptions mean for interaction design, where all of those are balled into one?  We can think about this using Clarke’s example of the digital camera:

Clarke uses the digital camera as an artefact that can may have a common starting ground for interpretation because it has a generally agreed upon function: taking pictures. This could be said about many things that we might design or encounter in HCI/d. However, one could also look at the digital camera an artefact of art, insomuch that it makes a statement about something (be it an unspoken position in popular culture, or unknown designerly biases that affect it shape and functionality), or that it is meant to be experienced in sort of the same way that art is meant to be experienced.

We could also interpret the digital camera as not the physical camera itself, but all the interactions the user might go through (using memory cards, carrying the camera around the neck, viewing pictures on the computer, etc.), or the ways in which ownership and usage of the camera change the user’s life (purchasing professional photo editing software, upgrading the computer run the software, going outside more to use the camera, attending more weddings, becoming obsessed with Flickr, etc.).

So the reason I state all that is that Clarke seems to suggest that there are two ways to interpret things: from a utilitarian point of view, and from an artistic point of view. The question I pose is when it comes to interaction design critique, does this hold true? Or is interaction design in a unique position to necessitate both, or something else that wasn’t said here?

In the paper the authors claim that the HCI design process is missing an integral final step, the step of interaction criticism. There are many other art and design oriented fields, such as film and literature, which already have a culture of expert critics. It is suggested that HCI should borrow from these fields, and also that the inability to properly reflect could stagnate the growth and acceptance of HCI.

With regards to the overall idea and concepts contained in the paper, I am convinced that it is important to cultivate a corpus of critique knowledge. This is especially important in an emerging field. Another thing to add is the manner in which this paper was written. Many HCI papers take a scientific approach to a field that is intrinsically abstract. This paper takes more of a literary and artistic approach that I feel more adequately tackles the abstract nature of design. The true nature of design cannot be defined. Art is the better medium for defining the “indefinable.” Note that I am not suggesting that design is art, although it can be.

The parallel of HCI design to film and books is obvious (as noted in the paper). Film and books are the result of the creator and are experienced by an audience. They are the result of design just the same as any type of technology. HCI already borrows methods and techniques from many other fields (such as pyschology and anthropology). It seems only fitting to continue this transdisciplinary tradition by snatching up some literary and film influence.