Learning in virtual worlds: Using communities of practice to explain how people learn from play

Although there is interest in the educational potential of online multiplayer games and virtual worlds, there is still little evidence to explain specifically what and how people learn from these environments. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the experiences of couples that play World of Warcraft together. Learning outcomes were identified (involving the management of ludic, social and material resources) along with learning processes, which followed Wenger’s model of participation in Communities of Practice. Comparing this with existing literature suggests that productive comparisons can be drawn with the experiences of distance education students and the social pressures that affect their participation.  Although there is great interest in the potential that computer games have in educational settings (eg, McFarlane, Sparrowhawk & Heald, 2002), and their relevance to learning more generally (eg, Gee, 2003), there has been relatively little in the way of detailed accounts of what is actually learnt when people play (Squire, 2002), and still less that relates such learning to formal education. In this paper, we describe a study that explores how people learn when they play the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft. Detailed, qualitative research was undertaken with couples to explore their play, adopting a social perspective on learning. The paper concludes with a discussion that relates this to formal curricula and considers the implications for distance learning. British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 40 No 3 2009 444–457 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00948.x    Researchers have long been interested in games and learning. There is, for example, a tradition of work within psychology exploring what makes games motivating, and relating this to learning (eg, Malone & Lepper, 1987). Games have been recently featured in mainstream educational policy (eg, DfES, 2005), and it has been suggested (eg, Gee, 2003) that they provide a model that should inform educational practice more generally. However, research exploring how games can be used in formal education suggests that the potential value of games to support learning is not so easy to realise. McFarlane et al (2002, p. 16), for example, argued that ‘the greatest obstacle to integrating games into the curriculum is the mismatch between the skills and knowledge developed in games, and those recognised explicitly within the school system’. Mitchell and Savill-Smith (2004) noted that although games have been used to support various kinds of learning (eg, recall of content, computer literacy, strategic skills), such uses were often problematic, being complicated by the need to integrate games into existing educational contexts. Furthermore, games specifically designed to be educational were ‘typically disliked’ (p. 44) as well as being expensive to produce. Until recently, research on the use of games in education tended to focus on ‘stand alone’ or single player games. Such games can, to some extent, be assessed in terms of their content coverage or instructional design processes, and evaluated for their ‘fit’ with a given curriculum (eg, Kirriemuir, 2002). Gaming, however, is generally a social activity, and this is even more apparent when we move from a consideration of single player games to a focus on multiplayer, online games. Viewing games from a social perspective opens the possibility of understanding learning as a social achievement, not just a process of content acquisition or skills development (Squire, 2002). In this study, we focus on a particular genre of online, multiplayer game: an MMORPG. MMORPGs incorporate structural elements drawn from table-top role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons being the classic example). Play takes place in an expansive and persistent graphically rendered world. Players form teams and guilds, undertake group missions, meet in banks and auction houses, chat, congregate in virtual cities and engage in different modes of play, which involve various forms of collaboration and competition. As Squire noted (2002), socially situated accounts of actual learning in games (as opposed to what they might, potentially, help people to learn) have been lacking, partly because the topic is so complex. How, indeed, should the ‘game’ be understood—is it limited to the rules, or the player’s interactions with these rules? Does it include other players, and all possible interactions, and extend to out-of-game related activities and associated materials such as fan forums? Such questions have methodological implications, and hint at the ambiguities that educators working with virtual worlds might face (Carr, Oliver & Burn, 2008). Learning in virtual worlds 445   Work in this area is beginning to emerge, particularly in relation to the learning and mentoring that takes place within player ‘guilds’ and online clans (see Galarneau, 2005; Steinkuehler, 2005). However, it is interesting to note that the research emerging from a digital game studies perspective, including much of the work cited thus far, is rarely utilised by educators researching the pedagogic potentials of virtual worlds such as Second Life. This study is informed by and attempts to speak to both of these communities.  The purpose of this study was to explore how people learn in such virtual worlds in general. It was decided that focusing on a MMORPG such as World of Warcraft would be practical and offer a rich opportunity to study learning. MMORPGs are games; they have rules and goals, and particular forms of progression. Expertise in a virtual world such as Second Life is more dispersed, because the range of activities is that much greater (encompassing building, playing, scripting, creating machinima or socialising, for instance). Each of these activities would involve particular forms of expertise. The ‘curriculum’ proposed by World of Warcraft is more specified. It was important to approach learning practices in this game without divorcing such phenomena from the real-world contexts in which play takes place. In order to study players’ accounts of learning and the links between their play and other aspects of their social lives, we sought participants who would interact with each other both in the context of the game and outside of it. To this end, we recruited couples that play together in the virtual environment of World of Warcraft, while sharing real space. This decision was taken to manage the potential complexity of studying social settings: couples were the simplest stable social formation that we could identify who would interact both in the context of the game and outside of this too. Interviews were conducted with five couples. These were theoretically sampled, to maximise diversity in players’ accounts (as with any theoretically sampled study, this means that no claims can be made about prevalence or typicality). Players were recruited through online guilds and real-world social networks. The first two sets of participants were sampled for convenience (two heterosexual couples); the rest were invited to participate in order to broaden this sample (one couple was chosen because they shared a single account, one where a partner had chosen to stop playing and one mother–son pairing). All participants were adults, and conventional ethical procedures to ensure informed consent were followed, as specified in the British Educational Research Association guidelines. The couples were interviewed in the game world at a location of their choosing. The interviews, which were semi-structured, were chat-logged and each lasted 60–90 minutes. The resulting transcripts were split into self-contained units (typically a single statement, or a question and answer, or a short exchange) and each was categorised 446 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 40 No 3 2009   The initial categories were then jointly reviewed in order to consolidate and refine them, cross-checking them with the source transcripts to ensure their relevance and coherence. At this stage, the categories included references to topics such as who started first, self-assessments of competence, forms of help, guilds, affect, domestic space and assets, ‘alts’ (multiple characters) and so on. These were then reviewed to develop a single category that might provide an overview or explanation of the process. It should be noted that although this approach was informed by ‘grounded theory’ processes as described in Glaser and Strauss (1967), it does not share their positivistic stance on the status of the model that has been developed. Instead, it accords more closely with the position taken by Charmaz (2000), who recognises the central role of the researcher in shaping the data collected and making sense of it. What is produced therefore is seen as a socially constructed model, based on personal narratives, rather than an objective account of an independent reality. Reviewing the categories that emerged in this case led to ‘management of resources’ being selected as a general marker of learning. As players moved towards greater competence, they identified and leveraged an increasingly complex array of in-game resources, while also negotiating real-world resources and demands. To consider this framework in greater detail, ‘management of resources’ was subdivided into three categories: ludic (concerning the skills, knowledge and practices of game play), social and material (concerning physical resources such as the embodied setting for play) (see Carr & Oliver, 2008). Using this explanation of learning, the transcripts were re-reviewed in order to