The Academic Guild: The Interdisciplinary Value of Ongoing Pwnage

Thomas Malaby · Moses Wolfenstein · Dan Norton · Linda Polin · Liz Lawley · Jeremy Koester · Matt Gaydos

Wed., June 10, 2:00–3:00, Main Lounge (2nd floor, Central)

The World of Warcraft (WoW) guild Terror Nova is made up of almost one hundred researchers on virtual worlds (and their friends and family), and has been in existence since fall of 2004. While its researcher members are acutely interested in virtual worlds like WoW, the guild expressly forbids direct research on the guild’s server. This constraint, along with other emergent and mandated features of Terror Nova, have contributed to intense and ongoing discussion, both in-game and on the guild’s website, of key issues in virtual worlds such as learning, governance, game play, game design, and guild organization.

This fireside chat will bring several “Terrors” together to discuss how this new kind of academic group serves as a forum for a uniquely productive interdisciplinarity, provides an opportunity to rethink effective governance for both educators and gamers, and exhibits for researchers personally the same kinds of social and instrumental pressures that their research subjects experience. How is a fertile mix of mature professionalism and mischievous trust made possible by online gaming environments?