Creative Collaboration in Online Virtual Worlds

在线虚拟世界中的创意协作

• 批准号: 0832803
• 负责人: Celia Pearce
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-06-01 至 2009-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0832803&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Creative; Collaboration; Online; Virtual; Worlds

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.

这是对那里大学(UOT)游戏和创造性合作的融合的探索性研究，UOT是一个正式的学习环境，完全由虚拟世界There.com中的玩家构思、创建和运营。UOT拥有147名讲师、27名工作人员和1869名注册学生会成员，既是一个大型合作项目，也是一个分布式学习环境。实地工作将主要通过参与者观察、访谈、对玩家创建的虚拟物品的分析、非虚拟协作环境和工具(如论坛)以及调查工具进行。这个项目建立在研究人员之前的研究基础上，该研究确定了“新作者”和“生产性游戏”的现象。与之前认为游戏天生没有生产力的假设相反，这项研究发现，高参与度的玩家可能会受到激励，转向一种创造性和生产力的模式，特别是那些受到与社区的紧密联系启发的玩家。因此，在参与文化生产的过程中，玩家被激励开始进行往往复杂和具有挑战性的合作和创造性努力。本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，分析玩家在在线虚拟世界中发起和维持创造性协作的具体方式，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洞察力，以了解游戏和工作之间的协同效应，以及如何将其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，以供将来进行更大规模的研究。