Bonnie'sBlog

Social games

2011-07-22T17:23:00.001-07:00

Want to come up to speed fast on all those social games you don't have time to play? Mia Consalvo's recent 2011 Foundations of Digital Games paper "Using your friends: Social mechanics in social games" will do the trick. As Mia said to me at FDG, "I played these games so you don't have to" :P As per usual with Mia, the paper is excellently written, packed with content, satisfyingly concluded with useful take-aways. The FDG Proceedings do not yet seem to be available online, so I will provide the link when they are.

A Hidden Gem

2011-07-22T17:11:00.000-07:00

Here is one of my absolute favoritist video gaming papers. It's been hidden away in an obscure publication and is now reprinted in a not much less obscure publication, a museum catalog no less. This work of which I speak is Celia Pearce's "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play." It's wonderfully written, includes great pix, and will make you wonder why we academics don't bestir ourselves to produce pleasing and provocative think pieces like this more often. Props to Celia.

Korea's Online Gaming Empire

2011-07-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

If you have not read Dal Yong Jin's Korea's Online Gaming Empire, I can recommend it as a uniquely lucid discussion of the economics and culture of video gaming. It happens to be about Korea, which is fascinating in itself, but Jin goes beyond regional study to examine how video gaming permeates society and how capitalism drives culture. It's just a swell book. I'll be using it in my Fall Quarter course on Games and Society. The chapter on professional video gamers is poignant and not to be missed.

Gaming in Central Asia

2010-08-04T14:50:00.000-07:00

Beth Kolko and Cynthia Putnam wrote a first rate paper on gaming in the Internet cafes of Central Asia where they conducted a lengthy, and very impressive, field study. They argue that online games -- the fun games -- can familiarize people with computers, and we should be open to this possibility in the context of developing regions.

Kolko and Putnam are still making a "games can be useful" argument but with tact and sensitivity, and, I think, a certain political acumen. They don't expect low income people to confine their computer usage to education, finding, jobs and other instrumental purposes, but many of us are not quite ready to hear that, so the authors do an admirable job of valorizing games as inherently pleasurable, which we should not mind at all because effective technical education comes as a useful by-product.

An excellent read, here.

Galloway's Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture

2010-08-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Short but sweet. A good, clear discussion of the concept of diagetic play. Galloway says of video games, "One must interpret material action instead of keeping to the relatively safe haven of textual analysis."

I agree. In my book I came at this issue through activity theory, a very different approach, but, for the most part, the same sensibility as Galloway's, that video games are living actions.

The Future of Girls, Gaming and Gender

2010-07-22T17:20:00.000-07:00

An exciting conference on girls, gaming and gender takes place with a public Forum starting Thursday August 12, and continuing with workshops through August 14, in Chicago.

The list of speakers has some heavy hitters, and and the hands-on workshops for girls sound really fun!

The first day is free and I cannot imagine this event would not be of interest to almost anyone.

An important paper from the late 90s

2010-07-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

As data mining becomes an accepted methodology for studying virtual worlds, it's critical to remember that much communication takes place in private tells and is not captured in logs. This is a robust finding going back to text-based worlds of the 90s. For excellent treatment of this topic see Diane Schiano's paper "Lessons from LambdaMOO: A Social, Text-based Virtual Environment."

Not only do private data generally elude data mining efforts outside of experimental contexts (which have severe validity problems), what goes on in private in virtual worlds is deeply engaging. It can't be overlooked.

My Life as a Night Elf Priest

2010-06-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

My book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft is available here. Twas very good fun writing the book, especially doing the research, but a lot of hard work too, like all books.

It is published by the University of Michigan Press in the Technologies of the Imagination Series.

Everything you always wanted to know...

2010-06-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

but didn't know where to look for an analysis of cybersex is right here in Zek Valkyrie's exceedingly good article "Cybersexuality in MMORPGs: Virtual Sexual Revolution."

It's chock full of data from his extensive field research, well-written, and devoid of the fey musings that afflict much of what is written on cybersexuality. Valkyrie has spent a lot of time in game with his eyes open. He doesn't go for the sensational but the real. There's a bit more on Final Fantasy than World of Warcraft but he covers both. He knows his sociological literature and draws on a good range of thinking about sexuality in contemporary society.

California quail

2010-06-15T07:18:00.001-07:00

This morning I had a moment of perfection in seeing two California quail perched in a leisurely way atop bushes in the ecological preserve near my house in Irvine. As the birders amongst you know, we often must content ourselves with brief glimpses of interesting species (common species uncharitably called trash birds), so to actually have the time to gaze at the quail was quite wonderful.

There was a pair -- a plump male looking fatter and more regal than the pix in the bird books, and his slighter mate. As I walked down the path I flushed the proverbial covey, and they scattered, but not very far. There has never been hunting in the preserve (at least not in living memory) and the birds seemed unafraid.

The best thing was seeing the quail, or at least the male two days in a row! Again, a rare birding treat.

The Digital Habitat

2010-06-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

With my colleagues Jannis Kallinikos and Giovan Francesco Lanzara, I co-edited a special issue of First Monday: The Digital Habitat: Rethinking Experience and Social Practice.

Available at First Monday.

It was fun working with the authors and I can honestly say I really like all the articles. The authors include the editors, and Yong Ming Kow, Paul Leonardi, Ron Day, Hamid Ekbia and Albert Borgmann.

Data Mining EQ2

2010-06-08T16:34:00.000-07:00

Ahman et al. take a large database from EverQuest II and examine experience logs, transactions logs, character attributes, demographic attributes, and cancelled accounts to infer gold farming activity. Even with a lot of data this exercise of inference is difficult. The authors conclude that they could not "precisely identify gold farmers" although the analysis did have some statistically significant effects.

Check it out here.

And it does have a cute title: Mining for Gold Farmers: Automatic Detection of Deviant Players in MMOGS.

Kristine Jørgensen's paper on audio in WoW

2010-05-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

Audio and Gameplay: An Analysis of PvP Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft" by Kristine Jørgensen analyzes how audio is constructed and experienced by battleground players.

It's a little heavy on generating a lot of fine grained categories that felt confusing to me, but quite useful in offering a nuanced discussion of how players actually experience audio. Very nicely done, and recommended.

Claudio Fogu's very interesting paper

2010-05-27T13:28:00.000-07:00

"Digitalizing Historical Consciousness" by historican Claudio Fogu is a rich, thoughtful paper. I don't agree with all of it, but Fogu argues that playing a video game is "closer to acting in drama than narrating in literature or representing in painting."

This is exactly the argument I make in my book. He goes on to observe that gaming is a matter of role playing, simulation, immersion and interaction -- not representation. I think he underestimates the importance of visual experience in video gaming (it is after all *video* gaming!) which he views as representation not immersion, but largely his formulation appears correct to me.

You need a university account to get to his paper but it comes right up if you google "Claudio Fogu video." It's in the journal History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History.

User creativity, governance, and the new media

2010-05-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

There is a special issue of First Monday published just today, "User Creativity, Governance and the New Media," edited by Yong Ming Kow and me (mostly by Yong Ming).

It has some very interesting articles -- check it out. First Monday is a wonderful venue - completely free, open, accessible. It reaches a wide audience and has many first rate articles. I always enjoy browsing there.

Nice paper from Tyler Pace and the Bardzells

2010-04-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

There's a good new paper from the ACM CHI Conference on romance in WoW. It explains how people meet others easily through whispers, and then use the features of the game -- and some pretty innocent ones, by the way, like flowers and food -- to get to know one another. Rather a sweet paper; it's not all hardcore out there on the Internet.

The paper is called "The Rogue in the Lovely Black Dress: Intimacy in World of Warcraft." WoW nerds, I know rogues don't wear dresses (even females), but the rogue in the paper had bought the Lovely Black Dress and wore it for romantic purposes.

Something wonderful from Liz Losh

2010-04-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

I recommend Liz Losh's excellent Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press 2009).

I especially liked chapter 3 on military video games, but each chapter is a fascinating, densely worked example of the U.S. government's involvement with digital technologies.

Liz is a superb writer; she knows how to "make media." You may find yourself admiring and enjoying her prose so much you have to remember the seriousness of her themes.

Coming to a Theater Near You...

2010-03-30T11:48:00.001-07:00

A young film maker named Kevin Michael Johnson is making a film about raiding. Check out the website here. Lots of interesting material, including information about how he's raising money, and discussion of what it takes to move forward with such an effort.

It all looks very cool. The film is still in the formative stages but I have a feeling it's going to be good.

Games of Empire

2010-02-25T11:57:00.000-08:00

Games of Empire, by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (University of Minnesota Press) is a provocative look at "ludocapitalism" with a Marxist bent. That's the plus and the minus right there, but beautifully written with great scope, and very much worth reading.

The Warcraft Civilization

2010-02-25T11:53:00.000-08:00

The Warcraft Civilization by William Sims Bainbridge (aka Bill, not to mention Computabull, Incognita, and several other cleverly named WoW characters) is a new MIT Press book on World of Warcraft. It's an elegant romp through Azeroth by a distinguished sociologist.

Bainbridge is a program director at the National Science Foundation, and has spearheaded efforts to fund research on virtual worlds.

Gaming and Literacy

2010-02-25T11:17:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of great material in this area, but I am particularly fond of Jonathan Alexander's essay in College Composition and Communication:

Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition

Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CCC/0611-sep09/CCC0611Gaming.pdf

Chris Paul's work

2010-02-25T11:09:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of Chris Paul's research. Chris is a professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seattle University. Read his work just for the dreamy prose, but if you are interested in media, rhetoric, and gaming (or any of the above), the content will grab you too.

Here's a very nice piece that came out recently in Games and Culture:

Welfare Epics? The Rhetoric of Rewards in World of Warcraft

http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1555412009354729v1

only in America

2008-12-15T11:06:00.000-08:00

The Christian Science Monitor reported that Blair House in Washington D.C. would not bump its customers for....the President! I am worried about where the President's family will stay, but still, this is kind of inspiring in the first-come first-served department:

"Even President-elect Obama experienced the crowded conditions surrounding his swearing in. Mr. Obama explored the possibility of moving into the presidential guest quarters across the street from the White House in early January so his daughters could start school on January 5. But the family was told that Blair House was already booked with events and receptions and so would not be available for overnight use until January 15."

awwww...

2008-11-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

Sometimes one's culture is captured in a tiny anecdote that kind of makes you proud. Apparently the Space Station launched some spiders for science experiments. There were news reports of a missing spider, but not to worry:

"We're not missing a spider," space station flight director Holly Ridings assured reporters Monday, adding that — since it's NASA — there is a backup spider with his own designated area. "The way it was explained to me, he came out of his bedroom and may be into the living room of the house."

A backup spider. In his living room! That essentializes for me the improbable mix of mind boggling planning with childish delight that is American science.

proved wrong

2008-11-05T09:40:00.001-08:00

Thank goodness.

In 2004 I saw Obama at the Democratic Convention and was very impressed. I said peevishly to my husband, "He should have changed his name so he could have a run at President."

Like millions, including some high profile pols like the Clintons, I greatly underestimated Obama. Not only did Obama prevail, he did it on his terms, with authenticity, civility, grace, and calm.

Here are a few reflections on the election that captured its essence for me:

Peggy Noonan observed that in defeating Clinton, Obama "brought down a political machine without raising his voice."

Obama took a page from Howard Dean and cranked up his technology machine right away. John Dickerson in Slate wrote, "Obama inspired a host of new voters and young voters, who helped make him the first post-baby boomer president. They all call him Barack, and he responded by texting them on victory night: "All of this happened because of you. Thanks, Barack."

Barack, I love it.

Even my original home state of Ohio went for Obama. Thanks again Dean for the 50 state strategy! Here's one of my favorite images from the campaign.

(If you have not seen Midwestern barns, they are really big, and it must have taken a lot of work to paint the image.)

socialism is alive and well in the USA

2008-11-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

I recently made a reservation at a hotel in San Diego to attend a conference. $179 a night. Not cheap.

I needed one more night. I called central reservations. They got me mixed up with another Bonnie and said the rate was $84. I said, "That must be another hotel." They said, no, same hotel. Then the clerk realized she had confused me with the other guest and said that wedding parties get a special rate.

OK, I can see a little bit of a discount for a group. But I am paying more than double what the wedding party is paying. How is that fair? And those reveling guests will probably make my business-oriented stay less enjoyable.

I don't know who's getting married, but I hope they appreciate my financial contribution to the nuptials :P

WoW and Pym

2008-10-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

I'm still playing World of Warcraft for my research. And because I just *had* to get the explorer achievements finished for Azeroth and Outland before the xpac.

After I play WoW I often curl up with my old Barbara Pym novels. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one on the planet with a passion for both.

Evolution of a MMOG

2007-01-22T10:38:00.000-08:00

I have been observing World of Warcraft as a social space for over a year.
I have found much to admire in terms of the game’s design and the player culture that has emerged. For those not familiar with WoW, these remarks won’t make much sense. But blogs are about whatever is on the blogger’s mind.

With the expansion (more content added to the existing game) I believe the designers diminished one rich aspect of social life in World of Warcraft. They demoted the great city of Ironforge to an auction house pit stop. Had they replaced Ironforge with a vibrant new social space in Outland, that would have been fine. Instead, Shattrath is a shopping mall gone bad. There is no natural gathering place. You are forced to choose between two opposing factions of the city. Since these factions are mostly about what gear you can work toward, there is no interesting narrative that justifies the fact that you will not always make the same choice as your guildmates and friends, hence you will not see them in Shattrath. Shattrath is simply a place to get business done as quickly as possible. While people would hang out conducting all sorts of activities in the space between the Auction House and Bank in Ironforge, there is no such space in Shattrath.

Furthermore, and it pains me to say this, Shattrath is populated by both Horde and Alliance! After slaying evil forces in deep dungeons, beating back ferocious beasts throughout the land, and encountering worthy opponents in the wilderness encampments of Azeroth, it was always nice to hearth back to Ironforge to be amongst one’s natural allies. Now the game is more focused on the repetitive quests, rep grinding, and so on. The designers believed that people would still go back to Ironforge for the Auction House, and made it easy to get there. What they missed was the diversity of tasks that kept people in Ironforge, giving them an excuse to mingle. It was a village with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.

I have much less experience on the Horde side, but Orgrimmar seemed to have a similar feel. It does not have the same gathering space Ironforge does, but there is an area with Auction House, Bank, and so on that was a focus of activity. I haven’t been there since the expansion but I expect it’s the same ghost town Ironforge is.

How can one get so worked up over a video game? Massively multiplayer games are a genuine social space in a world in which taverns, bars, hair salons, and all those other great spots simply do not have the same function they used to. I don’t think there is a one to one correspondence between online games and real world social spaces, but there is one important parallel, namely, a not-work social place for recreation and diversion. It is sad to see something that was working so well in the game messed up for no good reason. All the designers had to do was create a decent couple of capital cities in Outland. Perhaps they themselves had the same nostalgia for Ironforge I have, and they tried to preserve it, rather than having it become an abandoned ruin. It is, however, abandoned.

Just had to get that off my chest about Ironforge (*cries*).

More soon on what I love about Outland!! Outland is spectacular on many ways!

Roberta Lamb

2006-11-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

I am very sad to report that my colleague Roberta Lamb died recently after a brief illness. I helped bring Roberta to UCI and was very optimistic that she would make a huge contribution, in addition to her existing body of excellent work. Roberta was young and vital and her death is a tragedy for her family, colleagues, and information studies. She fearlessly tackled enormously difficult intellectual problems. Roberta's genius was to ask big, nearly imponderable questions and to ground them in lengthy precise field studies, sophisticated theorizing, and deep understandings of technology.

As a celebration of Roberta’s life I invite you to read her award-winning paper Reconceptualizing Users as Social Actors in Information Systems. This paper won the annual 2003 Best Paper Award of the MIS Quarterly, the leading journal in information systems management.

Acting with Technology

2006-11-10T12:23:00.000-08:00

My new book co-authored with Victor Kaptelinin, Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, has just been published by MIT Press.

The book has a beautiful cover with artwork from my colleague Bill Tomlinson. The image is of computer generated humans ("agents" in Bill's lingo), gathered around a digital campfire. I liked the image because of the grace of the figures and because it calls to mind Leontiev's famous vignette of the primitive hunters which you can read about in the book :)

Here is the first review of the book (that I I know of) by Clay Spinuzzi.

Play between Worlds

2006-07-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

I have been studying World of Warcraft, an online video game, and recently read T.L. Taylor’s new book, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press). Taylor, at the IT University of Copenhagen, has been studying games for several years. Play between Worlds is a thoughtful discussion of many issues, but the two of most interest to me were her examination of gender and player produced culture.

Taylor has conducted participant-observation field research in Everquest, a popular role playing game, since 1999. She has immersed herself in larger sociological, economic, and legal questions of the game, avoiding the pitfalls of ethnographic positivism Kallinikos identified. Taylor knows the game inside out. She handles a broad range of issues with authority, and, I might even say, wisdom. Her writing has a kind of quiet power.

It’s hard to know how many women and girls play competitive role playing games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft. There are no reliable statistics. Nick Yee has self-reports but I believe there are sampling issues there. Taylor says that it appears that females comprise 20-30% of Everquest players. That number feels very right to me after several months of playing World of Warcraft. I just run into females too much for it to be any less, and I think when the dust settles (if it ever does), we’ll find similar statistics for WoW.

OK, so Everquest has a clear majority of male players. Taylor describes the way the significant minority of females is marginalized in design discussions, as though somehow they are aberrations, and if only designers could find out what women want, they could appeal to women. It seems that the game does appeal to women, as Taylor argues. It appeals to women who like competitive role playing video games. The question for me is what cultural forces outside the game produce this number. Other games such as bingo and some of the simulation games have higher percentages of women. But the women who prefer games like Everquest are not aberrations – they are women who like games that a lot of men like too. I found myself wondering if we should be aiming for games that are 50-50 genderwise? Is that the ideal? What exactly do we want? Taylor’s book is a contribution in pushing us to ask such questions.

Taylor points out that while women and men both enjoy the social aspects of role playing games, it’s not just chat women are after. As she says, calling out chat as the main driver trivializes the activities of competing, playing, and socializing which go far beyond chat. In my preliminary interviews on gender and WoW, the word competition comes up as something that appeals to women who play. It seems this orientation precedes the game, so back to my question about the lower numbers of females for whom competition is a passion. Taylor notes that only recently have women’s sports really taken hold. A desire for physical competition was apparently either squelched or hidden in the bad old days. And still, only some women want to compete in sports.

Taylor writes quite a bit about the hypersexualized images of women in games. I am not an expert here but my sense is that World of Warcraft has toned this down somewhat, although representations of females with Barbie Doll proportions seem to be a permanent part of the culture in games and everywhere else. My darker question is whether women care about this. In looking around, I see young women going to work and school in revealing clothing clearly chosen to be provocative. Yes, yes, yes, playing around with subverting gender stereotypes and all of that, but honestly, men don’t get those subtleties. Women’s everyday clothing can be nearly as hypersexualized as the images in video games, so it seems if anything, a significant number of women have gone along with the culture on this one. Certainly some female gamers are uncomfortable with their choices for female characters. Taylor writes well about this. But I wonder if removing such images would have any impact on numbers of females players. I think not, but it would be interesting to find out in some empirically grounded way.

Taylor has identified the many ways in which players co-produce the game such as add-ons, FAQs, guides, forums, fan sites, and so on. While this point is very well-taken, it seems to somewhat delete the artistry and imagination of the developers. My most gut reaction to World of Warcraft is that it is a work of art. Yes it’s derivative of Tolkien and of other games, but the game experience is more than the sum of its parts. It’s tricky to say why it works, and I’ve never seen anyone put it into words, so I’m going to fail here too, but WoW is a work of art as a participatory experience. It’s not like looking at pictures on a wall in a museum, it’s not like playing a sport, it’s not like being in a club, but it’s a bit of each of these in an indefinable mix. There are many other ingredients that go into this mix but the end result is enormously engaging.

I don’t believe Taylor mentions the word “artist” very much in the book, but I think the leap of imagination the developers made in Everquest must be acknowledged as a key part of its success. Taylor suggests more input from gamers as a way to broaden co-production, but might this not kill the artistry? Artists must go beyond the ordinary. If one wants the gamers’ input, there’s Second Life.

I haven’t played Everquest, but World of Warcraft is beautiful, it’s witty, it constantly surprises. For those who play I’ll just mention a few places I consider amazing in graphics – Ashenvale, Jintha’alor, Ironforge. The references to high culture always make me laugh, like Kurzen’s Compound (Heart of Darkness) and A Tailor to Cities (Dickens). There’s tons of references to pop culture, most of which I’m sure I’m missing, but, for example, Jethro Tull’s Bungle in the Jungle. The game takes you back to the Middle Ages but it also takes you back to your own cultural experiences. Is this part of the elusive depth of play?

Taylor suggests that game companies pay more attention to gamers, but it seems Blizzard is already doing that. The challenge is to get the user input but then not just create a paint by numbers product. It’s clear from every patch that Blizzard has listened to feedback. It’s also clear they are worlds ahead of the users in dreaming up new content. That’s their value, their product.

Taylor comes pretty close to suggesting that game companies owe their users because of all the player-produced content, as well as free beta testing, and so on which add up to what she calls “labor.” I can’t quite see this. Labor, if that is what it is, is voluntary. People ask enviously in guild chat how a fellow player got to be a tester. Writing about how to play a game seems more like play than work to me. Of course this distinction raises many interesting issues that need further thought. Just because games enter people’s lives in meaningful ways does not mean that for-profit companies owe customers anything beyond normal terms of service, in our capitalist economy. I think Taylor wishes it were otherwise. If consulting users makes for great profits then companies can be expected to do so. Otherwise, nothing is changed about the fundamental game of capitalism which is profit.

We must ask if games such as Everquest could exist at all outside capitalism. One answer might be the simple MOOs and MUDs that preceded current massively multiplayer online video games. Back in the day they were great but they were never going to attract millions of players. Perhaps today’s game are a fruit of capitalism. With WoW there is a kind of proof in the 6.5 million player pudding.

I think it would have been interesting for Taylor to compare fandom in Everquest with fandom in some other realm such as those who love Disney experiences. There are some distinct similarities. Understanding how Disney attends to its customers might provide some insight into gaming, not in the radical way Taylor wants, but in an analytical way at least.

Games such as Second Life are all about user content so Taylor should be happy about that. There is room for calling upon the creativity of users and pushing the envelope in terms of player-production. While we could argue that Second Life is not really a game, there are player-produced games within Second Life. Maybe that’s why Second Life is not a game – because there are no artists creating a unified coherent experience.

Who should read Play between Worlds? Anyone interested in games of course, and anyone interested in thinking about the relationship between a company and its customers. That’s a pretty big audience for this lovely book. Don’t forget to read the footnotes, they are just as engaging as the main text.

Demi Lune

2006-06-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

Our dog Demi Lune has a double entrendre name. She is named after the Dark Side of the Moon because of her color and also Half Moon Bay, where we have a house. Another French Bulldog owner liked the name so much she borrowed it for her dog. They call him Floyd for short (Dark Side of the Moon --> Pink Floyd). Demi is the perfect dog; she barks only occasionally and not very loud, doesn't shed much, eats little, exercises when we take her out, fits in the kitchen sink for her bath, and is sociable and funny.

Li and Landay: activity theory meets ubiquitous computing

2006-05-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a thoughtful, interesting paper by Yang Li and James Landay that applies activity theory to problems in ubiquitous computing.

It is called Exploring Activity-Based Ubiquitous Computing: Interaction Styles, Models and Tool Support.

The authors want to move beyond the task/action level to longer trajectories of activity at the object/activity level. They are implementing an "ActivityStudio" to help designers and analysts model long-term activities such as keeping fit or providing elder care.

Their insight is that these activities are not just a linear series of tasks, but a set of actions, driven by goals, that unfold in the larger framing of motivated human activity. We may begin a fitness program but have to tailor it to injury, travel, aging, and other events. The object itself subtly changes as we respond to change and hence goals and actions change.

The paper is a short, sweet piece and highly recommended. The authors show how activity theory can be used in a practical way to model activity in an ambitious project of ubiquitous computing.

I got to meet Yang Li at the Conference in Montreal which was a treat.

A great new book

2006-05-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

I recently read a very interesting book by Silvia Gherardi, Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning. Gherardi is an Italian sociologist at the University of Trento. The book is part of a body of work known as practice-based research in which analysis of cognition and mind are displaced by analysis of “practice.” Practice is a slippery concept, and definitions vary, but it has to do with stable routine enactments in which human and non-human elements interact.

In a moment I will say why I think the practice-based approach is problematic, but first I want to say how extraordinarily nuanced and insightful Gherardi’s analysis of workplace learning is. She studied safety practices in the Italian construction industry, focusing primarily on tradesmen, but also discussing organizational approaches to safety. She chose an in-depth case study methodology, collaborating with a young male researcher who could apprentice in the industry (which as a female she could not readily do).

Gherardi developed the idea of the “situated curriculum” by which she means learning as a localized practice in which “content is closely related to the specific set of local, material, economic, symbolic, and social characteristics of the field of practices and work activities.” She contrasts this view with Lave and Wenger’s “learning curriculum” which is a more generic concept having to do with the learning practices of a profession at large.

Gherardi states that “The situated curriculum…exhibits an erratic, context-dependent, redundant, event-based and largely non-linear sequence where what to do, how to do it (and how to do it skillfully) are taught on an experiential basis and the novice ‘learns the ropes’ of the trade by imitation and contact with practitioners.” The key words for me here are “event-based” and “contact with practitioners.” It is in the minutiae of specific work events enacted in contact with practitioners that workplace learning happens.

This understanding nicely undercuts the illusion of “knowledge management” that attempts to bottle knowledge up in databases. As corporations lay off workers or outsource operations to less experienced and more isolated workers they hope to cash in on the expertise workers have built up over years of learning in the situated curriculum. Gherardi shows this is no more realistic than a cargo cult in New Guinea (although she does not use this analogy).

Gherardi’s analysis contains the surprising revelation that many senior workers did not want to reveal their expertise within the situated curriculum! And one novice was given same task over and over again limiting his learning. This realism was a breath of fresh air. Much of the analysis from the various “situated” camps deletes such dislocations, endorsing informal learning as superior to other forms. Gherardi shows how the formal training of the construction workers was a complement to the informal and became a critical resource. Gherardi presents the situated curriculum honestly, warts and all, making the concept much more useful for application as well as theory.

That’s the part of the book that was most most valuable for me. The larger project of advancing a practice-based sociology seems less useful. In the service of slaying the demons of the “rational decision maker” and AI, the practice approach eschews concepts of mind and subject. This is pretty drastic surgery for a non-fatal condition.

Gherardi says that practice-based analysis gives priority to practices over individuals, that even a collective subject is no good but we must attend to “sets of seeing, doing, and saying.” The concept of intentionality is rejected – perhaps it is too much like the rational decision maker? Gherardi advises that with the practice approach we need not worry about what’s going on in people’s heads or what they intend. We are also supposed to give up communication and language in favor of “discursive practices” which are identifiable patterned verbal interactions.

In practice-based theory we have lost our minds but gained our bodies, which are made visible in the theoretical discourse. For example, Gherardi says, “Craft trade requires trained bodies – ones, that is, which have incorporated an expertise or connoisseurship. It is through the body that ‘an eye’ for something [is developed].” The trained body is seen as an antidote to cognitivism and rationality.

While I agree that craft trades require trained bodies, I have some problems with this statement. First, the mind and body are not separate. Except for processes such as digestion the mind is required for what the body does. Practice theorists are engaged with the level of human activity at which the mind virtually always comes into play in working inseparably with the body. The practice approach has, rather amazingly, introduced mind-body dualism as a core principle.

Second, an emphasis on the bodies of others on the part of scholars who clearly have a vibrant mental life unnerves me. Those of us in the chattering classes know well that it is our abilities to spin original-sounding utterances that are not just same old discursive practices that earn our bread and butter. And our bodies can be flabby sorry things (although let me say that Gherardi is a trim stylish Italian) with very little training in evidence. So another dualism seems to be inadvertently advanced – those whose bodies must be trained for work and those who work with their, er, minds. A theory that only attends to learning in one set of occupations is not the general theory of learning we need.

Third, Gherardi says we can’t know others’ intentions and therefore they should be outside analysis. But how can we know a trained body? Gherardi quotes construction workers who invoke the body in their descriptions of how they work, but one could just as easily do that with quotes about intentions. (I’ve done it myself many times.) The rejection of mind in the practice-based approach is something more fundamental than a methodological maneuver.

I can’t help but feel a sort of puritanism in the practice-based approach. Mind is a natural phenomenon yet we must give it up as though it were an unspeakable excess, along with subject, communication, and language. See Schatzki, The Practice-based Turn in Contemporary Theory for other practice-based analysis that asks similar sacrifices of us.

I find myself in the position I often find myself in upon reading a serious work such as Gherardi’s – wondering if maybe we should just stick to mid-range theories grounded in ethnographic observation. It is there that so much insightful work seems to be done such as Gherardi’s development of the concept of the situated curriculum. Though I disagree with the practice-based approach in many ways, I will nonetheless be using Gherardi’s more grounded concepts in my research on learning in online games.

I hope I have suggested some of the reasons for reading this excellent book despite my misgivings about its larger framing. Another reason to read Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning is that Gherardi is extremely well-read and you can learn a lot by reading it. I found literature in the book that no one else seems to cite that Gherardi not only cites but explains and contextualizes. Gherardi’s courteous but critical analyses of many bodies of literature are woven through the text in a lovely pattern, providing insightful discussions of varied streams of research. She makes it look easy, but years of careful thought and reflection have gone into this book. Organizational Knowledge is itself as richly textured as the workplace learning practices Gherardi documents.

you love it and you hate it

2006-03-20T12:15:00.000-08:00

Here's something my son Anthony sent around:

"This is a cool representation of the 2004 budget.
Certain items stick out like a sore thumb, like the 2.64 billion we
spent on a single submarine. Here it is. Also, we apparently need 8 billion dollars worth of fighter jets. When was the last dog fight again?--Vietnam war maybe. They should put ME in charge of the budget. :) I would opt for a novel and creative approach in which all
money is spent on things that improve the lives of our citizens and the vitality of our communities! sheesh."

It is impossible for me not to see beauty in the submarine. At the same time, it is a weapon. It probably uses oil and other resources like there's no tomorrow -- an old expression that might have a more literal meaning than its origin intended.

The graphic of the budget is wonderfully expressive. A nice example of what can be done on a computer. At first I thought it should fit the screen but then I began to appreciate its power as I moved around it.

farewell to constructivism

2006-03-19T08:29:00.000-08:00

I recently read a provocative paper, “Farewell to constructivism: technology and context-embedded action,” by Jannis Kallinikos, an organization theorist at LSE. It is an analysis of relations between human agency and modern technology and a smart rap on the methodological knuckles for many of us.

Kallinikos argued that situated studies of local activity misapprehend contemporary technologies such as nuclear power, the automobile, and large information systems. These systems do not yield to local manipulation; they are neither negotiable nor configurable in meaningful ways. Kallinikos spoke of “ethnographic positivism” -- the tendency to dwell on the details (which are abundant and fascinating), missing the bigger picture beyond “the horizon of the present,” and missing the “mediation of history and culture.” Ethnography as it is practiced locates the immediately observable but does not usually involve a larger cultural-historical framing. Kallinikos dings actor-network theory for eliminating history and culture as well as constructivist mainstays like Orlikowski, Heath, and Luff. Their dedication to the details seems to Kallinikos a failure of “theoretical imagination.” Although constructivism need not have ended up this way, says Kallinikos, it has.

Kallinikos seems to suggest we have a figure-ground reversal problem. While is important to understand the interpretation and sense making people bring to bear in using contemporary technologies, such understanding must be “attributed its right proportions.” We have focused down on the local details while missing the enormous power technologies (in the hands of modern organizations) have to constrict our activity, to “enframe” our situations, to virtually eliminate huge swaths of our personalities as we conform to the rules of the game established by the organizations/technologies. Even organizations themselves end up conforming to technologies which are designed in the abstract, not in response to local conditions. “Most of the time, the experience of single local contexts are transformed and transcribed onto the standardized categories and procedures underlying the technological system.”

Kallinikos offered the example of ERP systems--Enterprise Resource Planning--as empirical support for his argument. In ERP, the only adaptable bits are the number of modules an organization chooses to use, and number and length of processes monitored. Kallinikos noted that the rhetoric of ERP is that it is totally configurable for any organization. But ERP reflects “an implicit understanding of organizations as procedural machines.” This understanding cannot be attained by studying a particular instance of ERP in practice in a local setting -- hence ethnographic positivism. It requires a historical analysis. Kallinikos also noted that the management literature does not see ERP as restrictive -- that literature is concerned with how to successfully embed such systems into organizations. Kallinikos thus subtly raised issues regarding the politics of disciplinary accountabilities through this example.

If there is a flaw in the article it is that Kallinikos did not address one of the most important contemporary techologies -- the Internet. The Internet seems to defy his characterization of contemporary technology as constricting, as limiting. But if we agree with Kallinikos that the trend is to confine, to enframe with technology, then we can predict that the communication and self-expression afforded by the Internet-- everything the ERPs of the world suppress -- will result in suppression of the Internet itself. We see signs of this already in censorship in certain countries, in attempts to control how people use the Internet, such as limits on time spent playing games like World of Warcraft and Lineage II imposed by the Chinese government. Of course that Kallinikos did not analyze the Internet isn’t a real criticism of the paper because there’s only so much a writer can do in the space of a single book chapter. But I’d be interested in his opinion on the matter.

As an anthropologist probably quite guilty of ethnographic positivism, I found this article very useful. I have been drawn to activity theory because from its origin it recognized the importance of culture and history -- it is the cultural-historical school of psychology. However, beyond formative experiments, activity theory has done little to elucidate how we should approach culture and history. This is slowly changing as activity theorists address organizational issues. I have been working on a paper on this topic which I will make available when it is in reasonable shape.

The Kallinikos paper is written with elegance and humility. Like Mumford and Ellul who were awed (in the old fashioned sense of the word) by contemporary technology, Kallinikos is beyond bombast. He has a clear message that he does not wish to hide with academic obscurantism. And despite his chiding, he manages to make those of us who need to be chided sit up and take notice.

always something new to learn

2006-03-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

I see that blogger posts are timestamped when they are first created, not when posted. Guess that means I'll edit in bbedit before posting just to preserve the moment precisely.

my new blog

2006-03-15T11:57:00.000-08:00

In September, Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, by Victor Kaptelinin and me, will be published by MIT Press. Since completing the book a few months ago, I keep running across interesting books and papers not mentioned in the book because we didn't know about them. This blog will be for discussing those finds, and others, as well as random musings. Meanwhile, here are the baby hummingbirds in our backyard in Irvine. They are at eye level in a melaleuca tree.