NSF: SGER: Creative Collaboration in an Online Game

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This exploratory study will analyze and understand the ways in which players of World of Warcraft, a popular multiplayer game, engage in creative collaboration. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role playing game with ten million players worldwide. The proposed research is novel in locating creativity in the context of collaboration in a distributed online space. Most creativity research is laboratory based. It takes the individual as the unit of analysis. This research will examine creativity as a collaborative act, and will investigate creativity in a distributed online context. The research will focus on modding - the creation and distribution of player-created software modifications that extend the game - as an act of creative collaboration. What is the effect of collaboration on creativity? What motivates players to maintain engagement? How does the game software itself support or hinder collaboration? What interaction tools do players use to undertake creative collaboration? What can be learned from creative collaboration in games about mediated collaboration in general? Can these principles be translated to other environments such as work, or does the very context of "play" have inherent qualities that cannot be easily translated? The increasing confluence of work and play in games and virtual worlds is a topic of growing interest in industry and the military. The practices of millions of young people are being shaped by participation in multiplayer games. Players will take these practices into the workplace and military service. Investigating how creativity is enabled by collaborative online practices is vital to our understanding of how work and military service can be reshaped to encourage and sustain creative activity in these arenas.