Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins has posted the fifth installment of "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:  Media Education for the 21st Century."  A series of posts based on his white paper on youth and participatory culture for the MacArthur Foundation (1., 2., 3., 4.).  Worth the read, worth the visit.  A few scribbles follow...

A participatory culture Henry establishes early on as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

How participatory are MMOGs, especially in light of this quote from Sonia Livingstone?

While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games-- and here they are already content producers.

Participation = contribution.  What have you contributed to your MMOG today?  Sheer personality only, is that enough?  More, less?

Today's post (part 5) also included discussion on a topic we've sliced here many ways before but whose words seemed fresh today.  It is on the interconnectedness that forms online player experiences (or in Henry's words, "distributed cognition") :

To plan appropriately, players may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring. Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem-solver, the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace. 

I thought of John Gage's dictim, recast:  the network is the game.

This is tricky in at least one regard.   November's ACM features a special section on "Entertainment Networking."  The story is an old one.  How does one manage the user experience in a distributed environment.  I claimed once the game as network as  a place built only for optimists!

Have a good night.  I'll be covering the ACM material in greater depth later.  Be sure to read Henry Jenkin's posts.   In close I'll poke again, what have you contributed today to your MMOG?

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Update 10/27,  Part 6.

Comments

[Michael Chui]

1.

What is this nonsense, "sheer personality only" not being enough? It is an immense task, practically Herculean, to truly contribute personality. (My apologies; I have been reading Harold Bloom's book: "Genius", and am almost through the first Lustre. =)

After a cursory review, I determined that Jenkins was literally copying and pasting his white paper into his posts; the main difference is the ordering he puts the essential skills in. If that's not true, please let me know, so I can actually read through his posts in more detail.

The question shouldn't be "what have you contributed today to your MMOG?"; it should be "what have you contributed today to your society through your MMOG?"

[nate combs]

2.

Michael>

What is this nonsense, "sheer personality only" not being enough? It is an immense task, practically Herculean, to truly contribute personality. (My apologies; I have been reading Harold Bloom's book: "Genius", and am almost through the first Lustre. =)

:P But is that a contribution your MMOG appreciates?

it should be "what have you contributed today to your society through your MMOG?"

Which society? Virtual or real or is there a difference?

> white paper vs. (serialized) posts

I think it is sufficient to read the white paper alone. All you would be missing (I believe) are comments.

[Michael Chui]

3.

Virtual or real or is there a difference?

Any society you belong to.

But is that a contribution your MMOG appreciates?

Yes, my MMOG does. Of course, it's text, so it has an advantage. *preen*

[Hirebrand]

4.

"It is possible to be a HERO in [EverQuest 2] but it takes dedication, patience and insomnia ....

A Hero in a MMO isn't someone who kills a dragon in one shot.

* It's the person who constantly fights for what is right with not only their class but with all classes.
* The MMO Hero is the one that helps with organizing information and issues without bias for the betterment of all.
* A MMO Hero is the person who day after day organizes the most annoying and boring raids possible.
** Bonus points for them if they constantly offer "open" spots to people that aren't in their guild.
* It's the person who makes time in their busy schedule to constantly fit in a bit of Tradeskilling for not only their friends and family (guild) but also makes sure that they are open for business for the world at large. And does their best to keep their prices as "fair" as possible.
* The one that constantly has a time to slip in a bit of knowledge into the "lowbie" channels despite how the phrase "where is flippy's hill?" can grate on one's nerves.
* The rare person willing to actually help some lowbie stranger who's spamming the channels with their pleas for help for some quest.
* The person who considers NBG a way of life instead of the exception ..

The above are just some examples of what "I" consider to be Heroic in an MMO.
by Kaisha of Permafrost"

[nate combs]

5.

Hirebrand>

Other examples of those who make significant contributions to their MMOG.

From the Daedalus Project, excellent comments on "Life as a Guild Leader."

A few random quotes:

"You could not pay me enough to lead a big guild ever again. It does becoem more like work than your real job. I have lead a guild in the past which had over 200 members in it and seemed that I spent 95% of my gaming time settling issues between members and dealing with in game politics."

...

"I have found that my prefered position is really as lieutenant. No one is as zealous as a functionary pursuing his function afterall. I just can't bring myself to initiate anything, especially when the group is not conditioned to regular group activity. I never really tire of answering questions because it often gives me opportunity to devise new strategies. I usually give different advice to people simply to see how they fare. Sometimes it is necessary to work more closely with the loyal opposition than your members, in order to generate the kind of narrative that keeps your members occupied and unified.
Things I have learned by observing leaders include what kind of character traits are necessary for a guild to succeed. Coldness, willingness to give commands but never really apologize, and reserves of stubborness are critical for a corporation to thrive. The gang leader has to be on top of everything from minute to minute because the game controls are heavilly centralized and battles are won and lost based on the fluidity of strategic information networks.
The troubles of leadership have inspired me to study everything from photomanipulation and webdesign, to oracle software and multi-user databases. I'm a glazier by trade. I suppose salesmanship is the only real skill I bring to the game.

EVE, M, 23 (Caldari)"

...

[Prokofy Neva]

6.

Obviously I believe strongly in the sheer force of personality and the Role of the Individual in History : )

But...just listening to a typical night on the World of Warcraft Ventrillo server, I have to be amazed. You find like 15-year-old kids and 42-year-old stay-at-home moms running these enormously complex guilds with their raids and leveling up and such. The negotiations that go on make the floor of the stock market seem like something very simply. The amount of information and social networking they are doing is like nothing I've ever seen. The moves and such are very complex. Of course, it's all wasted energy in a sense, because it's for a game quest. It's hard to know how all these skills and social networks are transfering to real life.

But maybe they don't have to. When I hear these guild leaders berate all their team mates who flubbed an instance, telling this one that he overestimated his skills, telling that one that he slacked off or let the team down, I see that these guild leaders are playing the roles that in our old world, used to be filled by parents, scout masters, basketball coaches, teachers.

People who are good at these raids and such in WoW then up their social cachet in a RL school -- it's like an overlay to reality.

I often wonder to myself what outer space program, what complex geographical expedition -- what war?! -- will be tapping into these enormous skill sets by this next generation of people skilled on the quests of World of Warcraft.

No doubt wars will have to be devised just to put them all to work...

[Michael Chui]

7.

Prokofy Neva says: No doubt wars will have to be devised just to put them all to work...

If you haven't already, read the Shadow Saga series, by Orson Scott Card. Especially read what ends up happening to all the kids. I think it's a nice rendition of what could happen on both sides of the coin.

[Linda Polin]

8.

Small contribution made possible by the mix that makes up the MMO world...

All WoW players are familiar with the Barrens Chat as an icon of sorts of the worst exchange possible among a 12-14 year olds. Early in my daughter's first year at middle school she brought us home a sample of her new 12-14 slang: "That's so gay," in which gay functioned as a derogatory term. We immediately had a discussion about that, and she did, with great noble effort, respond to its continued use at the school lunch table... allegedly. Early in our WoW gaming experience, it appeared on...LOL....Barrens Chat. I chose to respond in the general chat (for all) that I didn't like to see that word used as a put down, any more than I'd like to see the N word used in that same way. I got several private tells (whispers) saying, thanks I'm glad you said something. Now obviously I did not have an impact on anyone, other than, hopefully, my daughter who was playing online with me at the time. But that's good enough for me. And maybe, just maybe, some other folks will make some sort of push back remark when this rears its head again,w which it will do, no doubt.

Online worlds are worlds, with people engaged with one another. This is enough for social issues to arise and require response. And, in some ways it is easier to confront issues, such as the one I've shared, in a virtual world where escalation is mostly futile (the "ignore" command and the threat to "report you to the GM" tend to keep the lid on) and "real" identity is safe. It's easier to "try on" being someone who takes a socially responsible stand.

[ron meiners]

9.

Interesting stuff- my initial response as to what constitutes a "participatory culture MMO" would have been along the lines of the distinction between top down and user created content models. But certainly the stories emerging consistently out of WoW are all social- or maybe that's just who I listen to. Regardless, WoW seems, at the very least, have introduced a lot of people to the highly social and organized dynamics of large guilds, and organizing groups to achieve common goals, with all the drama, leadership, politics, and learnings about human social interaction.

Still thinking... and I've bailed on WoW (for the time being at least). But the darned thing really does consistently come up with interesting dynamics... or perhaps it's just the scale of it: like most things, it's much easier to see it when it's big.