What this blog is all about
Studying Life on Whyville.net
The purpose of this blog is to make our current research publicly available and to solicit feedback and comments on our work. Led by Yasmin Kafai at UCLA, our group studies many different aspects of life on Whyville.net, a large scale multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) with over 1.5 million registered players aged 8-16. Whyville encourages youth to play casual science games in order to earn a virtual salary (in ‘clams’), which youth can then spend on buying and designing parts for their avatars (virtual characters), projectiles to throw at other users, and other goods. The general consensus among Whyvillians (the citizens of the virtual community of Whyville) is that earning a good salary and thus procuring a large number of clams to spend on face parts or other goods is essential for fully participating in the WhyvilleKafai & Giang, in press). Social interactions with others are the highlight for most Whyvillians and consist primarily of community (ymailing (the Whyville version of
email) and chatting on the site where users are visible to each other on the screen as floating faces (see the figure to the right Whyvillians chatting on the beach). The work presented here will analyze various aspects of life in whyville including science learning, avatar creation and virtual identity, the role of cheating in advanced participation, and flirting and dating through Whyville.In the past ten years, multiplayer games have increased in popularity with now millions of players spending dozens of hours or more online each week. With the growing popularity of online games, discussions about their educational value have been initiated among researchers, practitioners, and policy makers (Glazer, 2006). There is an increased need to more fully understand these complex communities as promising models for learning and literacy (Gee, 2003).
