<The Devils Made Me Do It> - An Experiment in Teaching Collaborative Governance in World of Warcraft

John Carter McKnight

Wed., June 09, 2:00–3:00, Beefeater

This semester, a class of 25 — second and third year law students, second year Masters students and a few Honors College undergraduates — are participating in an experiment in self-governance in virtual worlds. Arizona State University’s “LAW 791/EDT 791 – Governance of Virtual Worlds” is built around the formation and management of a guild in World of Warcraft. The guild’s name, <The Devils Made Me Do It>, was chosen by the students as an ironic commentary on being “forced” to play a popular game as part of their graduate studies as ASU Sun Devils.

The students have been challenged to engage with issues of:

• External governance by corporate contract and national law,
• Affordances and limitations on governance tools in the software platform,
• Differences between deliberative and collaborative governance,
• Strategies, ideologies and values of community self-governance, and
• Actual-world implications of the virtual governance project.

At mid-semester, the students have, with minimal prompting from the co-instructors, recapitulated many of the fundamental issues faced by governance in the media age, from issues of access to participatory forums, to citizenship requirements, to acculturation and civics training, to problems of apathy and free-ridership.

The class, instructors and students alike, has come to grips with issues of teaching in the medium. The instructors were able to draw on a wealth of studies of the effectiveness of teaching in SL, scheduling small-group orientation sessions at the beginning of the semester, and pairing veterans with new players for peer instruction. Students have suggested and helped implement additional assignments to increase active participation.

However, the use of a gaming, rather than social, platform has given rise to unique issues, as has the extraordinary diversity of the class, in gaming background, academic discipline and age (with a 40-year range represented).

With the active help of the students, the instructors are assembling a set of lessons learned, revised assignments, and pedagogical techniques, to present to instructors interested in enabling hands-on learning of academic subjects in a game space. This presentation will summarize our early findings. With the help of the audience, we hope to identify areas for late-semester improvement and for future refinement.

Learning outcomes will include an understanding of how to enable participatory learning of complex material, rather than didactic teaching of content, using the affordances of an online game. We will share strategies for effective orientation, for maximizing participation, and for evaluating student progress. While the class has been built around sophisticated interdisciplinary graduate learning, the course tools are broadly adaptable across educational environments.