This is the complete text of the (hopefully) final draft of my seminar paper for this course. This paper examines the procedures designed within
World of Warcraft to encourage cooperative gameplay. This paper applies the theories of Ian Bogost, as well as several other major theorists in modern rhetoric, to a specific case study. I've been considering, analyzing, and examining
WoW in preparation for this study, which I don't mind saying kind of put a damper on my favorite past time. Still, I think it is important to note what Blizzard has done, why they have done it, and what implications these procedures may have on future game designs.
The United Fronts: The Procedural Rhetoric of
Cooperative Gaming in World of Warcraft
Sean J. Callot
Prepared for Dr. Jan Rune Holmevik
9 December 2008
America was founded on the concept of community action and group participation. Sarah Vowell explains that Massachusetts’ first governor, John Winthrop, stirred his crew of colonists to suffer and struggle together to build “a city on a hill” in the New World (Vowell). Centuries later, First Lady Hillary Clinton explained, “it takes a village to raise a child,” further demonstrating America’s strong community ties and how they are critical to the future of our country. On November 4, 2008, the people of the United States elected a community leader, Barack Obama, to the presidency on promises to unite people toward a common good. The vast majority of jobs posted on internet job search websites emphasize communication and effective teamwork. All of these examples emphasize the importance of working together to overcome challenges, ranging from local and personal to national and international. America is a network of communities, as any middle school social studies student can readily explain.
It comes to no surprise, then, that this concept of the importance of community participation has pervaded the gaming community. Role-playing games, beginning with Gary Gygax’s Dungeons and Dragons and continuing to today’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), embrace this all-American concept of cooperation to develop and overcome challenges. The most popular MMORPG on the market today, Blizzard Corporation’s World of Warcraft (WoW) embodies cooperative gaming in almost every aspect of gameplay. While it is completely possible to enjoy the game without playing with others, Blizzard embraced Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric to great effect. World of Warcraft encourages the player to engage in community participation through the implementation of several systems scaled for cooperative gameplay, including the economic system, the trade skills, the talent tree system, and the group quest structures.
Theoretical Constructs:
In order to explain how these systems mandate player interaction, it is important to understand what we mean when we discuss these types of systems and procedures. Ian Bogost has extensively examined different kinds of systems game developers have used in order to elicit certain desired responses from their games. In his book, Persuasive Games, Bogost explains how some games are built as tools of persuasion. Their designers control the player’s interaction with the story or system by designing controls that restrict certain behaviors and reward others.
Brenda Laurel sets the theoretical groundwork for Bogost’s theories in her book, Computers as Theater. In her theory, user interface design closely mimics the actions of a stage crew and performers producing a play for the audience. What the audience sees is a representation of the lines of computer code (or the “script”) performed on the desktop of their computers (“stage”) by the program’s external output (“actors”). The programmers serve as stage managers, directors, and other “backstage” roles, whose actions are only seen by the audience as the actor’s performance on the stage.
Bogost’s manipulation of this metaphor replaces Laurel’s faceless backstage performers, who merely create and interpret the data for representation, with players who have a clear agenda for what the audience should be drawing from this virtual performance. The backstage crews prepare and produce a persuasive story, which results in the actions on the “stage” telling a very clear persuasive story. In other instances, these crewmembers provide the audience with a limited set of controls, in some instances, which allow for audience participation into the running of the program they are watching. While most people can create a game with a message in the story line or quest structure, Bogost explains that these kinds of games are often seen as too heavy handed and fail at their attempts to persuade.
However, the games that embed a clear procedural rhetoric into the player interface tend to push their message a little more clearly. For example, Bogost explains that the design team behind The McGame built an overwhelming game experience by designing the controls to only allow a certain number of anti-social but accurate managerial decision options for handling situations. The response for dealing with an unruly counter attendant is to terminate his employment and hire a new smiling face to sling burgers. This approach demonstrates to the player how managers of hamburger franchises stereotypically handle poorly performing employees. Use of the termination control also prompts a response from labor representatives, which can hurt the hamburger franchises’ overall performance. The player gains a clear picture of the difficulties of a franchise manager in maintaining market share and addressing environmental, political, and labor issues.
Bogost proposes that these kinds of control choices, when used effectively, can produce a clear persuasive argument. When players are restricted to handful of limited command choices, such as in The McGame, the audience gets a sense of how difficult those choices can be. This fosters a closer understanding of the overarching problem, and demonstrates how difficult it can be to address that problem.
On the other hand, some games are designed to provide the player with not only a serious problem but also a set of tools to address that problem. Political campaigns have used this approach on several different occasions, including John McCain’s presidential campaign. McCain’s campaign produced the simple Space Invaders clone Pork Invaders with the expressed intent of demonstrating a stylized version of John McCain’s spending plan. The player controls a “McCain for President” as the avatar, which fires “Veto Pens” at flying pigs. Players are rewarded for their diligence at vetoing the pigs, which represent spending bills, with a running tally of “money saved.” Completing a level rewards the player with side-by-side comparison screens outlining the key differences between McCain’s economics plan and his rival’s plan. This game not only gives the player an understanding of McCain’s politics, but also empowers the player by demonstrating, in abstract terms, how simple the McCain plan can be.
Game designers are cognizant of the power they have when allowing or restricting player controls in their game environments. A search of the Blizzard Corporation website’s job postings offers a sizeable quantity of information about user interface developers, with an emphasis on coding language and game experience. This latter qualification is, presumably, to ensure that the programmers Blizzard hires will not only know how to make things work technically, but what should be possible and how to make the interface work within the metaphor of the game. By playing a game with an eye toward the way the rules of the game are constructed, and how players interact with those rules, one may see that the controls are not designed idly. In the case of Blizzard’s current main product, World of Warcraft, these procedural choices are very clearly designed to force players to interact with the larger gaming community in order to enjoy all of the content the game offers.
The Character Creation System
Richard Bartle explains in his article, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs,” that players of different walks of life demonstrate different play styles. Some players, Bartle’s “hearts” or WoW’s roleplayers, prefer to build connections with other players. Other players, Bartle’s “spades” or WoW’s player-versus-environment (PVE) players prefer to explore and engage the environment. Other players search for treasure, a primary action that describes Bartle’s “diamonds” or WoW’s “farmers.” Finally, there are players who just like to beat other players senseless. Bartle calls these players “clubs,” while WoW players refer to this play style as player-versus-player (PVP). Some combinations of the classes and races work better than others based on their play style. However, Blizzard made the choice to limit the amount of initial information players receive during character creation in order to encourage communication with seasoned players.
When a player first installs his/her copy of WoW and creates that first avatar, the display offers a suite of character creation controls for the player to choose from. Each of the eight races in the original WoW release, as well as the two additional races available in the Burning Crusade expansion, have a set of special racial abilities and a limited set of class roles those characters may pursue. Three text boxes are displayed on the left side of the character creation screen, each providing a limited explanation of some aspect of the game’s rules and what options are available for the player. The topmost box explains the two factions available for player selection, either Alliance or Horde. This explanation is simple and provides very little information about the goals of the factions or how they interact with each other. If, as in the case of this researcher, the player wishes to play in cooperation with his/her friends, the player must select the same faction as those friends. There is no out of play chat channel available within the game to discuss this option, although players often use external chat programs, message boards, or other forms of communication to coordinate this outside of the WoW universe.
The second box gives a brief explanation of what each race’s special abilities are. This is accomplished with a short statement briefly outlining the background of the race, attached to a bulleted list explaining, in abstract, non-playable terms, roughly what the selected race’s special abilities are. This listing helps give a seasoned player an idea of what character race they want to play, but there is no explanation of what abilities are passive (always on) and which are active (requiring player input to activate). The previously uninitiated player wanting to build a character whose racial abilities coincide with their desired vocation, and vice versa, can attempt through trial and error which roles work best under different circumstances, or again turn to external sources of information.
While the explanation of the races of the WoW universe, Azeroth, is common when examined against similar game types, such as Dungeons and Dragons or Everquest, the class system breaks from this gaming tradition in a reasonably startling way. After selecting a race that the player may find interesting and engaging, the player is restricted to a limited list of class roles from which to choose. The humans, described as “adaptable” in their racial explanation, have a wide variety of roles to play, from the bloodthirsty warrior to the divinely attuned, primarily healing priest. The diminutive, arcane attuned gnomes, on the other hand, are offered magic casters with no divine power. Gnome players are offered melee roles, including warriors and the agile, stealthy rogues, but they are still restricted from any main healing class.
Again, there is a text box present to explain what each class’ primary role is in the game. These descriptions are short and, while they convey some important information about each class’ abilities, they do not offer any in depth information or describe how each class interacts with other classes on the battlefield. While this encourages players to try out different classes and races as they begin their game experiences in order to find a character that best matches their play style, there is a significant body of player-generated information available to help players determine what kinds of characters they enjoy, why they enjoy those character types, and how best to build those characters and play with them.
The amount of data available from the player community and supported by Blizzard’s website, as the official World of Warcraft user forums are, help to compensate for the lack of information available from the in-game character creation page. Players looking for the best combination of class, race, and play style often examine this body of information in order to determine what they like to do best, or they are forced to play through various combinations of characters to determine which they like the best. Over the course of my research, my colleagues and I engaged in several discussions of character creation. We discussed many different combinations of personality type, play style, and which class/race combinations would work best given the circumstances. Through these discussions, two things became clear. First, my colleagues and I determined that our play styles were very different and that coincided with our choices of races and classes (though we all chose female characters, which, in game terms, is merely an aesthetic choice). More technically minded players tended to select characters that required a lot of careful analysis and oversight, such as mages or healers. Aggressive players, who represent Bartle’s spades, tended to design characters that can deal a lot of damage. I prefer playing characters that can protect and defend other characters, putting my character’s body in between my comrades and danger. While there are psychological issues that may address these character choices, they demonstrate the variety of personalities and how those personalities can each be addressed and rewarded with a character that fits each player’s desires.
Crafting
One of the first things a player notices when play begins that the character’s starting weapons and equipment look shabby. For a new paladin, his two-handed mace looks like a tree trunk duct taped to a broom handle. A new mage or warlock carries a worn cruciform dagger and wears a patchwork gown. These characters look very different from an epic-level character decked out in full spiked plate armor or robes spangled with stars. Between level one and level 80 are numerous wardrobe changes, complete with attached ability increases and other combat-oriented bonuses.
The reasoning behind weapon, armor, and equipment choices is well documented on forums and in third-party game guides. Most of these items are either found during quests or purchased from the Auction House (more on this follows later). However, there are plenty of players who make their own items through WoW’s system of craft skills. Each character has the opportunity to train in their choice of two professions. These professions may be chosen from three so-called “gathering” skills, such as skinning, mining, or herbalism; or from “production” skills, including tailoring, blacksmithing, leatherworking, jewelcrafting, inscription, or engineering. Characters may also opt to select enchanting, which includes both gathering and production abilities. Some characters prefer to select a pair of professions that will directly benefit their characters, such as casters making their own clothing from the tailoring skill, or warriors making their own armor from metals gathered using the mining skill and forged using a blacksmith’s hammer. Most of the time, this tends to be a very useful system of augmenting a character’s ability and making a little extra money by selling their wares either to vendors or on the Auction House. Players simply gather the materials they need from the environment (skinning animals, picking herbs, etc.) and fashion their shiny new gear by themselves.
There are certain recipes for each profession, however, that require components that any one player cannot produce on their own. For example, jewelers, engineers, tailors and blacksmiths eventually gain access to powerful recipes that require a mineral called arcanite. Arcanite is a mineral that is created by enchanters from minerals supplied by miners. According to WoWWiki.com, a third party wiki dedicated the deeper workings of Azeroth, enchanters have absolutely no use for arcanite in their craft. Why would enchanters ever bother using expensive materials to create a bar of arcanite that their class has absolutely no use for?
Every profession seems to have a recipe similar to arcanite in its absolute uselessness to the crafting character. Blacksmithing offers iron belt buckles, which blacksmiths have no use of. Several tailoring recipes call for leather and metal components, which a tailor, by virtue of the limit of two professions per character, cannot hope to produce. Characters who pursue virtually any of the professions will, at some point, find a recipe that requires components their attached gathering skill cannot provide. It is easy to bypass these recipes, but in some instances recipes that require odd components are critical to progression within the profession. These “cross-profession” recipes, to coin a phrase, are also very potent. Blacksmithing offers a superior set of mail armor around level 30 that requires a set of equivalent level leather armor. Several of the message boards around the WoW community report that this set of armor is critical for close combat characters, or “tanks,” to survive level-appropriate encounters with reduced downtime from healing. In order to become the highly successful in their profession as well as their class, players have to find some way to locate the materials for their “cross-profession” recipes.
The most obvious way, since the materials needed for “cross-profession” recipes are almost universally character-created items, is to contact a character of the desired profession and ask them for the materials. This requires a lot of communication, searching, and cooperation amongst a wide variety of players. Guilds, large communities of players who work together, offer the wide variety of players who have selected a wide variety of professions. These guilds, when they actively work together, share materials and produce the crafted equipment each player needs to fit into their niche within the community. Essentially, guilds do offer a fantastic way for players to succeed in their professions and have full access to their “cross-profession” recipes.
The Auction House
Another, much more popular way to address “cross-profession” recipes, as well as make some much-needed coin, is to head to any of the player’s faction’s city and enter the Auction House. The Auction House is a system of interlocking player-generated auctions that allow players to buy and sell unneeded equipment and materials to other players. The Auction House is set up with each auctioned item classified into broad categories, with an easy to use browsing and bidding system. Each profession has its own listing for recipes found in the world, raw materials, and end products. An economist could have a fantastic time examining the market forces at play in setting prices for the Auction House, and how best to buy and sell character-created and world drop items (items found from killing enemies in the world).
Of course, there is a drawback to engaging in purchasing items from the Auction House. On the one hand, buying recipes and raw materials for profession training is expedient, but it is also expensive. For example, the market value at the time of this study for a piece of linen cloth is about 1 silver piece. This cloth is usually found on low-level humanoid enemies in the world in stacks of between two and five. According to a tailoring progression guide found on third-party sites (Thott), a player needs to find roughly 150 pieces of linen cloth for efficient progression through the profession’s recipe listing. This means that a character can either kill, on average, about 200 humanoid enemies (based on an average drop rate 60%, or three pieces for every five enemies, according to thottbot.com), or purchase those necessary pieces of linen from the Auction House for a total cost of one gold and 50 silver pieces. For a lower level character, this cost is prohibitive if taken on alone, when enemies only reward a character with a few copper pieces. At an average coin drop rate between levels one and ten of only about 6 copper pieces per enemy, a character would need to kill about 2,500 enemies, not counting the sale of unusable world drop items to a vendor. This long example generally means that, for a low level character trying to improve their profession quickly, the items they can either kill every humanoid enemy they see for a couple of hours (an action known as grinding), quest and sell all of the items they collect for a couple of hours in order to gather the money they need to purchase the necessary cloth, or they can combine these techniques, which is still time-consuming. A colleague of mine, who is much better at math than I am, determined that progressing in a profession in this manner is “tedious.”
Later in the game, however, the Auction House becomes all but indispensible. Linen cloth is a relatively easy to find item in the world. Rare quality weapons, armor, and crafting materials are, as their name implies, much more difficult to find in the world. In order to build an effective combination of weapons and armor, with class-appropriate ability enhancements, characters often turn to the Auction House to find their desired items. Sometimes the item a character needs to get those extra few points of damage per strike, or that handful of extra health or armor points, requires significantly more effort than a player is willing to expend. In this case, the Auction House fills the gap. If a warlock finds a rifle that he can’t use but a hunter could put to great use, it makes sense to sell that rifle to a hunter. Hundreds of hunters browse the Auction House every day, so the chances of the warlock receiving a good price for his find are pretty high. Multiply this situation by the ten million registered players who play and enjoy WoW, and it is easy to see how the Auction House fills a very important procedural role in improving community participation. If a player finds something they don’t particularly want, they can auction it to the highest bidder and make some extra coin. If a player needs a piece of equipment, and has participated in the system by selling unwanted equipment, she should have enough money to bid or buyout the auctioned item they need. The system reinforces participants and encourages their further participation not only in the game, but also in the community.
Talent Trees and Abilities
In addition to gear, a player has the option of adding additional abilities, both passive and active, to a character in order to customize and develop a highly capable member of their class and faction. These abilities are enabled by either learning them through class trainers or by specializing their characters through talents. Beginning at level 10, each character gains one talent point per level, each of which can be allocated to specific abilities on one of three talent trees. Each class has three talent trees, and each tree focuses on one of three specializations in the class. For example, hunters can specialize as marksmen (increased damage at distance), survival (increased individual survivability, specializing in traps and other nasty tricks), or beastmaster (specializing in improving their pets’ strengths). By reading the message boards and testing out each of the specialties, players can determine which talent tree best fits their character’s needs.
The specialization of abilities within these techniques is generally centered on either group play or solo play. A hunter who specializes in survival or beastmaster generally is more capable in a solo role. The hunter can kill enemies, or have her pet kill enemies, faster than the enemies can kill her or her pet. Hunters cannot take a lot of damage, so any kind of mitigation, such as improved melee damage (for enemies who get inside their harder-hitting ranged weapons’ effective rage), improved dodging (you can’t kill what you can’t hit), or stronger abilities for their pets (why take damage when your pet dragon can take it for you?), can all help expedite gameplay and character progression. Hunters who specialize in marksmanship, on the other hand, tend to be better suited toward group play, since all of their efforts are focused on their ability to put arrows into targets at distance. When you have another character keeping the enemy’s attention away from you, you are better capable of doing the maximum amount of damage to that enemy. This technique of “tank and spank” is common with group tactics.
Simply making these options available for characters is one thing. Characters are perfectly capable of mixing and matching talents and abilities to fit their playstyle. However, in order to unlock the strongest talent-based abilities, a character has to invest a lot of time and effort into each talent tree. A character progressing through level 80 is allocated just enough talent points to unlock one complete talent tree and most of one secondary tree. As Burke teaches with his concepts of orientation and terministic screens, to select one talent or ability excludes other options. This is also true for the ability command interface, which, using the default key mapping requires the player to select twelve single key commands to prefer. A hunter who specializes in ranged encounters generally maps her keys to activate her twelve favorite on-demand attacks. In a harsh fight against several enemies, either in solo play or group play, having the best possible collection of combat commands at a player’s fingertips can mean the difference between victory and death-related downtime. The WoW instruction manual and in-game support offer no information about these command options, so a player has to either rely on his own experience or take the more expeditious route of communicating with other players. Chances are, when a player learns important information from a more knowledgeable colleague, that player will contact their new friend for in-game partnerships.
Group Quests, Instances, and Raids
All the communication, cooperation, and group participation espoused and suggested, either passively as with talents or professions, or overtly as with the Auction House, prepares players for their first large-scale cooperative encounters. Most players first determine the need for additional support in their gameplay the first time they encounter an enemy with gold trim around their in-game portraits. These enemies are known as elites, and boast higher hit points and damage potential than standard enemies. The first time, and indeed the first three times, an unsuspecting character tries to engage an elite on his own, that character will, more often than not, find himself running his spirit form back to his corpse to try again. The odds of a single character killing an elite of equal level are exceptionally low. When paired with another player or two of equal level, those odds increase substantially. Quests that target elite enemies are often labeled as group quests, with a suggested number of players included in the quest text. The rewards for quests of this difficulty are greater than for an average quest, as is the treasure an elite enemy drops when it is killed. The allure of increased quest reward, including money, gear, and experience, is often enough to pull together quick groups of a couple of players. Blizzard even provided a quest sharing protocol to facilitate group quest organization and participation.
Group quests, however, are simply a microcosm of much larger group efforts. Blizzard developed a variety of caves and dungeons, filled with elites and vast riches. The environmental content within these dungeons is much richer and better styled than the world outside, with background sounds, beautifully designed caverns and intricate hallways and rooms. Players encounter enemies they’ve never seen before, with challenging combination attacks and improved social cooperation. While in the main world enemies tend to operate individually or in pairs, the denizens of dungeons rush the player characters much more aggressively with large mobs of elites. These encounters will kill single, unsupported, equivalent level characters in short order. The only way to successfully enjoy all of the rich content and have an opportunity at the valuable equipment in a dungeon is to go into the encounter with a group of four other skilled, like-minded players. When a group of five enters a dungeon, the players in that group face a set of monsters and traps that is specific for those players. Multiple groups can enter multiple instances of the dungeon, allowing each group to face the dungeon without competing for kills with other groups.
Note: It is possible for a high level character to “push” a lower level character through a dungeon, but this practice of “power-leveling” is outside the scope of this examination.
Even the difficulties presented by dungeons pale in comparison to the ultimate challenges Blizzard produced for WoW. Where five characters can, with difficulty, complete a level-appropriate dungeon, there are 25 and 30-man dungeons, called raids, which can eliminate even the most skilled groups. Raids focus on killing the hardest, meanest, best-programmed boss characters in the game world. These monsters, including dragons and daemon kings, have fantastically over-powered combat skills and spells, and can often summon additional elites to assist in their defense. The rewards for these raids are the greatest available in the game, ranging from epic-level weapons and armor to piles of gold. However, the only way to successfully attempt these challenges is with a very large, very well organized group of skilled and specialized characters.
Forming a group to attempt the challenges of a group quest, dungeon, or raid can often be as difficult as working through the dungeon itself. The easiest way to do this is to serve in a guild that actively engages in group play, since these often offer large pools of players who love nothing more than a challenging game experience. Guilds also help defray the costs of these encounters by pooling resources, including money for repairs, powerful equipment, and healing potions and elixirs. These communities even offer material benefits of membership, including guild-specific tabards and access to community events. After all, the die-hard players who participate in guild raids and dungeon runs still like to indulge their “heart.” Guild communities, according to several players I interviewed in preparation for this examination, are the best way to get the most out of the player versus environment, and even player versus player, content in WoW.
The drawback of guild participation is that guild members have lives outside the game world. Sometimes players simply are not available for a raid, or don’t like a certain dungeon instance. In these cases, Blizzard offers an in-game chat channel that spans the server, allowing any character on any continent to contact any other character with the expressed intent of forming a group. There are even looking for group (LFG) and looking for more (LFM) protocols embedded in the game program. These protocols allow characters to publically post which dungeons, group quests, or raids they would like to take on, and allow other players to browse what classes and characters are interested in participating in those group challenges, respectively. Participation in both of these systems is entirely voluntary.
Just as guilds offer benefits and drawbacks based on availability of players, the LFG chat channel and protocols have their own drawbacks. The difficult nature of group challenges, such as a dungeon run, are very demanding on even the most skilled players. Players who are not familiar with the controls or party communication options, such as party chat or voice over IP (VOIP) communication systems, can weaken a team. It has been my experience, both in game encounters and real world combat situations, that effective communication is key to survival. Additionally, groups assembled solely from the LFG protocol do not offer information on the strengths or weaknesses of each member. Immature players, players who are not skilled in their class abilities, players who enter an instance only to complete short-term goals and not finish the instance, or players who selfishly take all equipment for themselves tend to detract from the group gaming experience. After all, no one wants to play with players who do not work well in group encounters.
In order for a character to enjoy all of the content Blizzard spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours developing, as well as gain access to the most powerful and best looking equipment in the game, playing with a well organized and skilled group of players is essential. The gameplay protocols available, including guild structures and the LFG system, provide the procedures necessary to form and effectively use these groups. Blizzard designers, by examination of the content and tools made available as well as the restrictions and requirements for accessing that content, engaged in powerful procedural rhetoric. The goal of all of these procedures, from the quest system to the group challenge content, is to influence players to participate in cooperative gameplay. This is logical based on the nature of massively multiplayer gameplay, where millions of players have the opportunity to play together. The designers produced exceptional pieces of procedural rhetoric to facilitate this logic.
Conclusion
This examination of the cooperative procedures of World of Warcraft has been a pet project not only of mine but also of several my professors and colleagues. The research has spanned over a year of gameplay, conversations with fellow players, and investigation of secondary sources. Discussing why players select their classes, professions, and group encounters, my colleagues and I have learned that, as Bogost explains, learning how one system works helps to understand how other systems work. By examining the procedural decisions the design team made during the development of WoW, we are able to understand not only how games are played but how the lessons learned from the real world can effect decisions made in the game world, and vice versa. Players who are experienced in making leadership decisions, such as combat leaders or project managers, tend to make effective decisions in participating in group dynamics and manipulating protocols that facilitate cooperative gaming. Players who learn the protocols before learning leadership skills often learn how to manipulate similar systems to garner greater group goals. Bogost explains that this commutative principle of procedural knowledge may be explained as procedural literacy, which bridges the gap between constructivist and behaviorist pedagogical theory (Bogost 241). Students who play games, as Bogost and Gee explain, tend to learn not only how to address challenges within the game in creative ways using the procedures available, but also how problem solving techniques learned in these games may be applied to the outside world.
There is still much research in this field to be done. There is very little to no research showing any correlation between successful participation in cooperative gameplay, as demonstrated in WoW, and successful participation and leadership potential in real world scenarios. However, enough research has been undertaken demonstrating a potential for the United States Armed Forces to develop and use cooperative games in training some of their most skilled and specialized combat troops. My own experience with these training aids is limited, but these tools provide combat leaders with communication and tactical command experience in very realistic exercises. Not only are they an enjoyable change of pace for the soldiers who participate in these exercises, they are much cheaper and less dangerous than fielding soldiers in combat environments.
It may be possible to use programs and procedures similar to those found in WoW to teach other professionals about cooperation, teamwork, and effective leadership techniques. By focusing on the nature of cooperation as the procedures examined here, and the lessons these procedures teach players about larger cooperation effects, game developers may be able to produce a kind of massively multiplayer management training game. Such a project would be well received by proponents of non-traditional corporate instruction, such as Marc Prensky. Prensky explains that traditional instructional material is boring, which detracts from the learning experience. Enjoyable training, such as a remediated version of WoW, is “far more effective” than traditional training (Prensky 15). The key to developing an instructional program that is entertaining as well as effective is to focus on the procedural rhetoric in the same manner Blizzard’s team of developers did when producing WoW. By subtly nudging players into cooperative gaming encounters, Blizzard not only improved their membership numbers, as well as their bottom line, but also facilitate numerous interpersonal partnerships and relationships. The in-game experiences players encounter through the course of their play, as I learned through my research and experiences, are only made richer through sharing those experiences with friends and colleagues.
Works Cited
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