CRITO Faculty Associate Bonnie Nardi is a professor in UCI’s Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of ICS. Her areas of research interest include Activity Theory, Interaction Design, Computer-mediated Communication Society and Technology. Her paper “Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft” appears in the System Sciences, 2007 and was presented at the HICSS 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference. The paper was coauthored by Justin Harris and Stella Ly. Ly, a CRITO staff member, developed a character, was interviewed, and collected data for the project.

They examined the learning culture in the online game World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is one of the most popular online video games, with 8 million active subscribers in North America, Asia and Europe.¹ Players are connected through the Internet in persistent worlds, and they develop characters that explore, fight, socialize, make money, take up professions and advance through 70 levels of complex play. Players develop strategies, discover thousands of game facts, and make choices about character development.

The research team analyzed the way players learn the complex game through chat conversations with peers. They describe three kinds of learning: fact finding, devising tactics/strategy, and acquiring game ethos (defined as the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature or guiding belief). They examined the emotional tenor of learning conversations, noting their drama, humor and intimacy.

The goal of the paper was to examine conversational activity in the zone of proximal development to investigate the nature of learning in the World of Warcraft. The team observed that learners accomplish more with the aid of experienced peers than they could on their own. One of the surprising findings was the emotionally inflected discourse in many learning conversations, including drama, humor and intimacy. They also noted that the learning culture is constituted by the players themselves through chat conversation, such that learners can freely ask questions, offer useful advice, and moral knowledge is negotiated and shared.

The paper falls under Nardi’s research in Computer-mediated Communication and Society and Technology. Her investigations in this area suggest that a good deal of communication is intended to create feelings of connection between people rather than to convey specific messages.

While face to face interaction is especially rich in ways to establish connection (touching, eating together, making eye contact, sharing common space, informal chitchat), people also establish connection through mediated communication. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, email, chat, newsgroups, listservs, websites, and games are especially interesting forms of human communication that establish and maintain fields of connection as well as allow for the exchange of substantive information.

In future research Bonnie Nardi will examine the extent to which other persistent online conversations may provide a curriculum with some structure. Click here for a copy of the paper. More information about Bonnie Nardi’s research can be found at CRITO Researchers.

¹Blizzard Entertainment Inc.


(CRITO Research Spotlight, March 2007)

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