A Topology of Literacy Practices in World of Warcraft

Constance Steinkuehler

In previous work, I argue that participation in MMO games is participation in a constellation of literacy practices (Steinkuehler, 2005, 2007), both traditional and digital. In this paper, I further these claims with preliminary results from an empirical study of the quantity, type, and quality of online artifacts that comprise the network of World of Warcraft (WoW) resources, tools, texts, and artifacts. This study has four stages. In stage one, we conducted structured interviews with 30 expert WoW players to find out what online resources they use in the course of normative gameplay and how important each is to their normative play. In stage two and using these identified resources as starting points, we delimit the set of online materials that fully comprises the WoW resource network based on definitions of so-called “web community” or “hyperlinked community” advanced by network theorists (Barabási, 2003; Flake, Lawrence, & Giles, 2000; Gibson, Kleinberg, & Raghavan, 1998). With this network of resources identified, we are then able (stage three) to make some definitive statements about the quantity and variety of the “constellation of literacy practices” entailed in playing WoW. Are they player created and collectively maintained? Are they interactive resources? Do they contain mathematical or other model types to aid decision-making? Finally, in stage four, we assess the quality of the literacy network in terms of traditional definitions including the national reading, writing, and technology standards (International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, 1996; International Society for Technology in Education, 2007) and suggest more contemporary definitions means to be digitally literate based on the data corpus examined. This presentation reviews findings from the first two stages of this work and details the premises and hypotheses of the remaining research.

References

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Flake, G. W., Lawrence, S., & Giles, C. L. (2000). Efficient identification of web communities. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 150–160). Boston, MA: ACM Press.

Gibson, D., Kleinberg, J., & Raghavan, P. (1998). Inferring Web communities from link topology. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 225–234). Pittsburgh, PA: ACM.

International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English (1996). Standards for the English language arts. Newark DE: International Reading Association.

International Society for Technology in Education (2007). National Educational Technology Standards. Retrieved June 1, 2008 from: http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForStudents/2007Standards/NETS_for_Students_2007.htm

Steinkuehler, C. A. (2005). Cognition and learning in massively multiplayer online games: A critical approach. Unpublished dissertation. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Steinkuehler, C. (2007). Massively multiplayer online gaming as a constellation of literacy practices. eLearning, 4(3), 297–318.