Creative Collaboration in Online Virtual Worlds

这是一项关于There大学（UOT）中游戏和创造性合作融合的探索性研究，这是一个完全由虚拟世界There.com中的玩家构思、创造和运行的正式学习环境。UOT拥有147名教师，27名教职员工和1869名注册学生会成员，是一个大型协作项目和分布式学习环境。实地工作将主要通过参与观察、访谈、分析玩家创建的虚拟文物、虚拟之外的协作环境和工具（如论坛）以及调查工具在世界中进行。该项目建立在研究者之前的研究基础上，该研究确定了“突发作者”和“生产性游戏”现象。与之前认为游戏本质上是非生产性的假设相反，这项研究发现，高度投入的玩家可能会被激励过渡到一种创造性和生产力模式，特别是那些受到与社区紧密联系的启发的玩家。因此，在文化生产过程中，玩家被激励着手进行复杂且具有挑战性的合作和创造性努力。这项研究将使用混合方法，包括从管理员、教师和学生那里收集的定性和定量数据，来分析玩家在在线虚拟世界中发起和保持创造性合作的具体方式，以及玩家如何利用、颠覆和增强网络游戏软件来完成与工作相关的任务。这项探索性研究将为计算机支持的协作工作和相关领域的研究人员提供见解，以便了解游戏和工作之间的协同作用，以及这些协同作用如何应用于与工作相关的协作任务。这将包括如何使用网络游戏软件的技术和工具来加强工作场所的创造性协作和知识共享。结果将包括一套初步的设计指南和假设，未来的大规模研究可以以此为基础。

This is an exploratory study of the convergence of play and creative collaboration in the University of There (UOT), a formal learning environment conceived, created, and run entirely by players within the virtual world There.com. With 147 instructors, 27 staff members and 1869 registered members of its Student Union, UOT is both a large-scale collaborative project and a distributed learning environment. Fieldwork will be conducted primarily in-world through participant observation, interviews, analysis of player-created virtual artifacts, and extra-virtual collaboration environments and tools such as forums, as well as a survey instrument. This project builds on the investigator's previous research, which identified the phenomena of "emergent authorship" and "productive play." Contrary to prior assumptions that games were inherently unproductive, this research found that highly engaged players could become motivated to transition into a mode of creativity and productivity, especially those inspired by a strong connection to their communities. Thus engaged in a process of cultural production, players were motivated to embark on often complex and challenging collaborative, creative endeavors. This research will use a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative and quantitative data collected from administrators, instructors and students, to analyze specific ways that players initiate and maintain creative collaboration in online virtual worlds and how players leverage, subvert and augment networked play software for work-related tasks.This exploratory research will provide insight for researchers in computer-supported collaborative work and related fields in order to understand the synergies between play and work and how those might be applied in work-related collaboration tasks. This will include how to use techniques and tools from networked play software for enhancing creative collaboration and knowledge sharing in the workplace. Outcomes will include a preliminary set of design guidelines and hypotheses upon which larger-scale research could be based in future.