Workshop Learning From Games

I am organizing a workshop together with Marinka Copier on December 19, which we have entitled Learning From Games. You can find the call for participation here.

What we would like to do in this workshop is explore this new field and investigate what organisations can learn from the design of virtual gaming worlds and the emerging types of behavior in and around these games. It will be an exchange of ideas as well as setting some goals for research in 2008.

With participants coming from the game design field (Utrecht School of the Arts) as well as business (IBM, Ordina and Nyenrode Business Universiteit), it promises to be an interesting exchange. More about this later.

Virtual Worlds and Communities of Practice

A couple of weeks ago I presented in a teleconference organized by CPsquare, a network of people involved in building communities of practice in both public and private organizations*. Etienne Wenger, who first coined the phrase "communities of practice" along with Jean Lave, is also involved in CPsquare. You can find the presentation I used over here. The discussion focused on the relevance of virtual worlds for knowledge-based organizations. The discussion with this group was interesting, but it is also evident that further research and a deeper understanding is necessary to turn these ideas into practice.

Some interesting points from the discussion:

The misfit between the new networking skills (especially prominent in the new generation) and the old organizational structures was acknowledged. Examples were given of young people leaving an organization because of this, which further stresses the need for organizations to better accomodate these new skills.

The possibility of transferring skills that you acquire while playing a game like World of Warcraft to an organizational setting was met with some skepticism. This of course depends on how you view World of Warcraft: is it a "just a game", completely separated from your "real life", or is it one of the many networks in which you participate. Following the lead of people like Marinka Copier, I tend to take the latter approach.

*Thanks, John Smith, for organizing the discussion.

What managers can learn from virtual worlds

I gave a presentation last week at a conference in Amsterdam. The conference was about Business Process Management in the financial sector. My presentation was about "What we can learn from virtual worlds, games and the gamer generation". And although the subject of my talk did not exactly fit the theme of the conference, the questions and feedback I got from the audience were very positive and encouraging. You can find the presentation here. It is in Dutch and doesn't contain much text, so it may be of limited use without my talk to accompany it.

In my talk, I argue that many organizations are still bothered by old, bureaucratic structures that limit their ability to function in our network society. I then give a brief introduction about virtual (gaming) worlds, using examples from my recent fieldwork in World of Warcraft. My main point is that enterprises should mimic certain aspects of virtual worlds to make new ways of working possible. It's important not to be distracted by the monsters and dwarfs you see on the screen. That is just a content layer. The social layer above it is where these tens of millions of players are collaborating on complex tasks and new ways of working are emerging.

I gave two specific examples. The first is the mechanism of what I call informed trial-and-error, which enables faster decision making. It is made possible in World of Warcraft by a combination of detailed information about your own performance and abilities, immediate feedback about your actions and the possibility to recover from mistakes. The second is the principle of meritocracy that arises in World of Warcraft: assembling teams based on the skills of participants and to a much lesser extent based on (irrelevant) aspects like age, gender or location.

Let me be the first to point out that all this is not new. My own fieldwork in World of Warcraft only confirmed earlier insights by authors like Constance Steinkuehler. The recent Seriosity study by Reeves & Malone also contains ideas along these lines. The new element is trying to isolate some of the mechanisms we see occurring in virtual worlds and to apply them in another context (i.e., an organizational setting).

What was interesting about the audience response was that they, for the most part, shared my view that these virtual worlds offer a lot for managers to learn from. Especially combined with challenges they face such as accommodating a new (gamer) generation of workers and working across distances with outsourcing partners. The big unanswered question of course is: which interventions are necessary in an organization to actually apply these lessons? That will be the subject of our research the coming year, when we will be testing some of our ideas.

Letting a meritocracy be reflected in your office environment? Embedding informed trial-and-error into your business processes? Exciting times ahead!

Presentation at Conference on Communities & Technologies

Here is the presentation I gave yesterday during the workshop on Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings, as part of the Third International Conference on Communities & Technologies at Michigan State University. Volker Wulf and Aditya Johri were able to assemble a diverse group of people for the workshop, which led to many interesting avenues of discussion throughout the day.

With regards to my presentation, I was happy to receive a lot of positive feedback on my research perspective. The timeliness and relevance of studying virtual worlds as a test bed for possible new ways of working in organizations was acknowledged. The theoretical foundation seems to be fairly solid, as well. But as before in Finland, the group struggled with the tension between work and play (as do I).

The most interesting element of that discussion was a contribution by Karsten Wolf (who also presented a paper on his own World of Warcraft research during this conference). He argued that perhaps the tasks that are being performed in a virtual world (he used "killing a dragon" as an example) are much simpler than the tasks performed in a work context. Maybe simpler is not the right word, but at least they are not ambiguous or polluted by politics, which makes collaboration easier.

We also discussed possible reasons for the fact that these virtual world communities thrive without face-to-face contact (as do many open source communities) and came up with a "technology expectancy" theory: if you expect to be able to communicate face to face at some point, you will see computer-mediated communication as a hindrance. If you do not anticipate to communicate face-to-face, you will see the same technology as an enabler.

I will post some more comments about the conference tomorrow.

Leadership in virtual worlds

The results of a very interesting study came out this past week. Led by Byron Reeves of Stanford (and Seriosity) and Thomas Malone of MIT (with important contributions from Nick Yee and others), the study looked at how leadership in virtual worlds relates to traditional leadership models. You can find the full report here.

I was very encouraged by this study, since it starts from a perspective that I wholeheartedly support: there are practices taking place in virtual worlds that foreshadow new ways of working in enterprises. Reeves and Malone focus on leadership, applying the Sloan Leadership Model to online games, but they acknowledge that it applies more broadly to the areas of collaboration, innovation and business processes.

The most interesting conclusion from the study is that it is the environment that makes leadership easier in virtual worlds. Specifically, they say it’s the virtual economies, the transparency of metrics, and the connection methods for inter-group communication. The implication may be that changing the “game” may be as important as selecting and training the players. What they are basically saying is that enterprises should try to mimic certain aspects of virtual worlds, so as to make new ways of leadership (and collaboration, and knowledge sharing, etc.) possible. That is a very encouraging perspective, as far as I'm concerned. Let's see what I can contribute to the discussion.

This coming week, I’ll be off to Michigan State University to participate in the Communities & Technologies Conference. I’m looking forward to a stimulating discussion in the workshop I’ll be part of, and to interesting exchanges with other researchers in the field. I’ll post the presentation I’ll be giving and some impressions of the conference in the course of next week.

More conference news

My paper about knowledge transfer in virtual worlds was not accepted for the ECSCW 2007 conference. On the positive side, I received extensive review comments which gives me some more insight into the position of the CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) community on this subject.

Positive elements in the comments where the acknowledgement that this is a timely topic and that the paper did a good job of explaining what drives the popularity of virtual worlds. The paper was also credited with giving insight into the way virtual worlds might encourage new ways of information transfer and trust building that are lacking in other forms of computer mediated communication. The motivational attributes that are identified in the paper (see my recent presentation in Finland for more on that) offer a good basis for further research.

The biggest problem with the paper is of course that it is a purely intellectual exercise and not a report on new research. In that sense it was considered premature by the reviewers, who would have liked to see some ethnographic evidence of the practices described in the paper. No argument there, but that will be something I will be working on in the coming months.

On the whole, I am encouraged by the comments. I guess a rejection for this particular conference was inevitable because of the lack of empirical evidence I supply.

On a further note, my contribution has been accepted to the workshop on Communities of Practice in Highly Computerized Work Settings, which is organized as part of the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies at Michigan State University. That promises to be an interesting exchange of ideas.

DiGRA conference

I received an invitation today to present at the poster session of this year's DiGRA conference to be held in Tokyo this September, based on a paper I submitted in February (about virtual worlds as a tool for knowledge transfer). I'll receive additional reviewer feedback shortly, so I don't know exactly what they liked and didn't like about my submission. More about that later.

Virtual teams and virtual worlds

In 2001 we did some research about work in virtual teams, i.e. teams that are not co-located. We interviewed members of virtual teams in twelve multinational organizations and came up with a "pyramid of virtual team success" which included (from bottom to top): technology, setting objectives, competences, leadership, communication and establishing a team culture. You can find more details in the presentation below.



It's 2007 now, but I think much of what we found at the time is still relevant today. The available technology has evolved (somewhat), but most of the challenges that virtual teams face have not disappeared. However, with Wikinomics and Synthetic Worlds penetrating deeper and deeper into our culture, the time has come to take a fresh look at the subject. Some encouraging signs are an interesting post this week by Lisa Galarneau on the Terra Nova blog about the subject of virtual teams and some thoughts on using virtual worlds as a collaboration tool on the Virtual Cultures blog. Maybe the gap is slowly being bridged.

For myself, the next step for the coming months will be a mini-study of a team operating in a virtual world. I want to get a sense of how they are able to overcome the boundaries of space, time and culture. How do the elements of our good old "pyramid of virtual team success" translate to a virtual world environment? I'll keep you posted on the results.

Presentation at Gamers in Society

Here is the presentation I gave today at the Gamers in Society seminar in Tampere, Finland. To summarize it briefly: I state that the intrinsic motivation that virtual worlds supply leads to more room for social aspects (as opposed to the task-oriented nature of "traditional" ICT), which in turn leads to more knowledge transfer. Let me talk a little bit here about the feedback I got.

First of all, my presentation apparently struck a cord with many of the people present because it sparked quite a bit of debate. Many different aspects entered the discussion, all very useful to further my thinking. And even though a lot of elements of my presentation were challenged, it was done in a very positive and constructive way.

One of the biggest problems that the audience had with my perspective was this: while you could argue that intrinsic motivation is an important aspect of virtual worlds (which makes them an enjoyable experience), wouldn't the fun stop as soon as you use virtual worlds in a work context? One commentator stated that "you cannot force people to have fun", which is true of course. In this round of discussion, the divide between the world of managers and the world of gamers came somewhat to the forefront. I was in the latter arena here, which meant some skepticism here and there about things having to do with the corporate world.

There was also some criticism about my (admittedly fairly blunt) statement that the use of "traditional ICT" (embodied in my perspective by the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work) is always extrinsically motivated whereas virtual worlds are always intrinsically motivated. It is of course not that black and white. Examples were given of extrinsically motivated activities in games. Also, the possible difference in motivation was pointed out between what draws you into a virtual world initially and what keeps you there. In the discussion about this point, the exclusivity of virtual worlds as supplying the five elements of intrinsic motivation that I mention was challenged. Examples were given of social networking sites like LinkedIn or MySpace that also can be said to show most of these elements.

So where do I go from here with this project? One adjustment that I think I'll make to my approach of the subject is this: I will not focus so much on virtual worlds as a tool for knowledge transfer, but rather on virtual worlds as a way to create the preconditions for knowledge transfer. And one of the most important preconditions is trust, which (as one commentator pointed out) I have to decompose a bit further. Another aspect I want to consider incorporating is the development of managerial skills inside a virtual world (for example, by leading a raiding guild in World of Warcraft).

The most valuable comments were made by the two invited commentators (T.L. Taylor and Daniel Pargman). They focused on the next steps in my project and on how to go about actually investigating the managerial relevance of virtual worlds. Their contributions supplied me with some solid ideas that will be very useful in the coming weeks and months when I go about designing my research methodology.

Off to Finland

I am off to Finland next week to present a paper at the Gamers in Society seminar, organized by the University of Tampere Hypermedia Laboratory's Game Research Lab. I submitted a paper about the possibilities I see for virtual worlds as a tool for knowledge transfer (more or less along the lines of an earlier post here, but a bit more refined). It will be interesting to get feedback on my ideas from some of the bright minds in the digital games research community, such as T.L. Taylor, Daniel Pargman and Frans Mäyrä. A bit intimidating as well, I must admit.

I will post my presentation and some impressions of the seminar in the course of next week.

Promising developments

I came across another company this weekend that offers virtual world solutions for corporate use: ProtonMedia. And unlike Qwaq (see earlier post), this one seems to have the right approach. They approach the use of virtual worlds from a learning perspective: using virtual worlds to foster networks and communities of practice in organizations. One of their advisors is Jay Cross, who has written a book about what he calls Informal Learning. This concept is related to the approach to knowledge management of people like Larry Prusak and Rob Cross. Our research on virtual worlds is very much inspired by those people and is also trying to uncover the value of this technology in the area of knowledge transfer. It is encouraging to see some products already being positioned in that field.

Space and Place

As I mentioned in an earlier post, virtual worlds such as Second Life are not new. As a matter of fact, around the turn of the century there was a blossoming field of research called CVE or Collaborative Virtual Environments (I even put in my two cents' worth [in Dutch] at the time). With its roots in Virtual Reality, CVE research introduced a new and important aspect to ICT: that of shared virtual spaces populated by avatars. That period also saw virtual worlds on the internet, with ActiveWorlds as the Second Life of that time, albeit with nowhere near the current media exposure. For more on that period, check out Bruce Damer's excellent history lesson over at Terra Nova.

And although most of the products, worlds and research projects from that period didn't last, it is important to take some of the lessons we learned with us. I see a tendency in current virtual world research to not be informed by important CVE discussions of the past. One of the most important discussions of the time focused on the concepts of space and place.

The obvious difference between using a virtual world such as Second Life and a normal website is the 3D aspect. A virtual world tries to create a sense of physical space. This space allows us to see ourselves (our avatars) in relation to others (their avatars), which means we can stand close or far away from somebody, face them when they speak or use rudimentary body language. This shared space also allows us to work together on or talk about objects that we can all see. This aspect of using " shared artifacts" was an important drive in CVE research. It is also presented as an important selling point for current virtual world tools such as Qwaq (see previous post and a discussion I had on Raph's website).

The lesson I draw from the CVE period is that too big a focus on space can make us forget the creation of a place. A place is a space invested with meaning. The easiest example is the home (as a place) compared to the house (as a space). How interesting is it for a company to have a space in Second Life when nobody visits it. Wouldn't it be more useful to create a Web 2.0 style website that actually draws visitors and creates a place to promote your brand?

The biggest impact a virtual world can have is when place and space are combined. A sense of community (a place that I like to go back to) combined with a shared space that makes it possible to " bump into" people and strike up opportunistic conversations [1]. That is were the true power of virtual worlds lies.

[1] Remy Evard, Elizabeth F. Churchill and Sara Bly, "Waterfall Glen: Social Virtual Reality at Work" , in: Elizabeth F. Churchill, David N. Snowdon and Alan J. Munro (Eds), Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Places and Spaces for Interaction, Springer-Verlag, London, 2001.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Shortly after Sun showed their MPK20 workspace (see previous post) another company came out of stealth this week with a virtual world collaboration space: Qwaq. With the venerable Alan Kay as one of their advisors, I will not doubt they've given their business model a lot of thought. However, my gut feeling is that they are too soon and have chosen the wrong approach.

I feel Qwaq is making a translation of virtual worlds to a business collaboration context that is too literal. A literal translation of a virtual world to a business collaboration context has been attempted before. Around the turn of the century a virtual world called Alphaworld was a bit of a hype (although nowhere near what we're seeing with Second Life at the moment). This coincided with the popularity of a research field called Collaborative Virtual Environments (virtual reality based collaboration spaces). We then also saw companies trying to capitalize on this popularity with a business-oriented virtual world collaboration space. The one that springs to mind is Blaxxun. The company still exists but we have not seen a large-scale adoption of these kinds of collaboration spaces in the past five years. One of the reasons is off course that there was never a consumer pull for virtual worlds like there is now. It was more or less the hobby of a small number of researchers. The context has changed tremendously, with tens of millions of people using virtual worlds now.

However, I personally don't think that just because there is now a big consumer market for virtual worlds, applications in business like Qwaq will suddenly be succesful. We are just beginning to understand what is behind the current success of virtual worlds like Second Life. It will take a bit more study to understand which aspects of virtual worlds can have a relevance in a business collaboration and knowledge sharing sense. And that is exactly what our research project is trying to uncover.

For now, I would put my money on companies like Raph Koster's Areae which is much more in touch with the gamer community and related aspects of fun, enjoyment and motivation. As described in a previous post, this is the direction that we are currently taking in our project.

Beyond Second Life

The Game Developers Conference that is currently taking place in San Francisco has some interesting announcements that hopefully open the eyes of the world to the fact that there is more to virtual worlds than Second Life.

The most spectacular announcement was Sony's Home: a free virtual world for Playstation 3 users, to be launched this fall. The 3pointD blog posted a video that makes Second Life look like something from the 1990s.

The other announcement was by Sun, which is making its game development platform (Darkstar) open source and showed a virtual workspace based on this platform: MPK20. It is basically a virtual world that Sun employees use to collaborate in teams. It is the first environment I've seen of this kind, other than some experiments in Second Life by the likes of IBM. It is important to keep an eye on virtual world developments at Sun (and others, like Multiverse and Areae) amidst all the Second Life hype.

A voice you can trust

Linden Lab is reportedly close to including voice in the Second Life interface. Nate Combs makes some interesting comments about the use of voice in virtual worlds over at the Terra Nova blog. Most interesting from the perspective of the knowledge worker is the relationship he discusses between the use of voice and trust. Voice should increase trust, which makes the transfer of knowledge easier. But will the use of voice disturb other aspects of the virtual worlds experience? The issue merits some further investigation.

Virtual worlds, motivation and knowledge transfer

There is a considerable difference in approach between virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and 'traditional' ICT to support communication and collaboration (the latter is known as computer supported cooperative work or CSCW). Virtual worlds are about entertainment and play while CSCW is connected to work. It is this distinction that provides an interesting tension and a basis for our virtual worlds research project.

The aim of many current CSCW projects is to try to support all aspects of the work patterns of a group in a situation where the group is not in one location. However, it is a well-established fact that ambiguous and informal information is not easily communicated by means of ICT. We often revert to face-to-face contact for these situations. Prominent scholars of CSCW have concluded that this poses a fundamental problem, described by Mark Ackerman as the social-technical gap: ICT cannot support all social aspects of the work patterns of a group. Others have argued that trying to imitate a face-to-face situation with ICT is essentially a dead-end road.

What this means is that CSCW falls short in the area of effective knowledge transfer, because this depends on opportunities for informal communication (as put forward by the likes of Davenport and Prusak). The field of knowledge management has shown that effective knowledge transfer is key in achieving sustained competitive advantage.

When looking at the human-computer interaction taking place, the focus of CSCW as described above can be characterized as a focus on extrinsic motivation. It is not the human-computer interaction itself that is motivating, but it is the outcome of the activity that should supply the motivation. We are motivated by accomplishing a work-related task. The ICT we use seems to be more of an irritating intrusion that is best avoided by meeting in person.

What is missing, then, from a typical CSCW situation is an intrinsic motivation: the human-computer interaction itself supplying the reward. This is what happens in virtual worlds, where the experience of using this technology becomes enjoyable in itself. A review of research on virtual worlds and related subjects gives some indications of the ways in which this intrinsic motivation is created:

• by giving the user appropriate challenges and rewards
• by taking the user out of everyday existence
• by giving the user a first-person perspective with direct feedback (important early work in this field was done by Brenda Laurel)
• by creating an opportunity for shared activity
• by allowing the user to see himself within the context of the group.

If organizations do not solely want to rely on face-to-face communication for the effective transfer of knowledge, a new set of ICT tools is needed. In numerous situations, face-to-face contact is expensive in terms of time and money. An effective way to transfer knowledge while avoiding these costs can be very attractive to many organizations.

The current state of the art in CSCW does not supply these ICT tools. The theory presented here suggests that virtual worlds may offer better opportunities for knowledge transfer based on their elements of intrinsic motivation. Following from the discussion above, we aim to answer the following research question:

Does interaction by means of virtual worlds generate higher levels of knowledge transfer than interaction by means of e-mail, chat and online team rooms in groups of knowledge workers with similar features?

We are currently refining this research question in discussions with fellow researchers and clients. We welcome your input. To design a suitable research method, the next step will be to define the elements of the research question and hypotheses in a way such that they can be observed and measured.

Knowledge workers in Second Life

One of the areas of research that we are focusing on at YNNO is the managerial relevance of virtual worlds. Second Life is of course the most well-known example at the moment. It has become a victim of media hype in the last few months. Because of this media attention it has also become a popular vehicle for product marketing, with companies like Toyota, Nike, Philips and ABN AMRO announcing their presence.

Virtual worlds have been with us since the beginning of the 1980s. They started out with communication in text only and since the end of the 1990s we also have graphical virtual worlds with a 3D, first-person perspective. Increasing computing power and available bandwidth fueled a growth of these virtual worlds from the beginning of this century, primarily in gaming environments. Only very recently have non-gaming worlds like Second Life and There gained a critical mass of users. It is important to note, however, that the gaming virtual worlds like World of Warcraft are still several orders of magnitude bigger than Second Life. In total, there are some 15 to 20 million people worldwide (accurate figures are hard to find, but the best available data is here) that regularly spend a considerable amount of time in a virtual world (Nick Yee has reliable data about the amount of time spent in these worlds).

What makes these virtual worlds interesting from our perspective is that new ways of communicating and collaborating seem to be emerging in these environments. Users of these virtual worlds pay no attention to the physical location of the person they are speaking to and will collaborate just as easily with someone from the same town as with someone from the other side of the world.

Many organisations would love to have this flexibility. Especially in this day and age, when the success of an organisation increasingly depends on knowledge workers being able to find each other quickly to reach the best solution, independent of their location. Something seems to be happening in virtual worlds on the internet that might very well be a fit with new organisational forms in our knowledge-based economy.

One of our research projects is aimed at investigating what makes these virtual collaborations successful and at finding out what managers can learn from this. This project started started in August of last year and some of the first results are taking shape.

Watch this space for updates.