Living and Learning on Whyville.net
Multiplayer games and worlds have increased in popularity with millions of players now spending dozens of hours or more online each week. We know surprisingly little about what younger players do in virtual worlds like Teen Second Life, Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, Virtual Laguna Beach, There and others. Discussions about their promises and problems have been initiated among researchers, parents, developers, and policy makers. The purpose of this blog is to make our current research publicly available about one such teen virtual world called Whyville and to solicit feedback and initiate discussion.
Whyville.net currently has over 2 million registered players ages 8-16. In Whyville, teens are encouraged to play casual science games in order to earn a virtual salary in ‘clams’, which they can spend on buying and designing parts for their avatars, 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 Whyville. Like other virtual worlds, hundreds of cheat sites have been developed outside of Whyville to reveal shortcuts and introduce new players to virtual customs.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, UCLA researcher Yasmin Kafai and her team study many different aspects of Whyville including science learning, avatar creation and virtual identity, the role of cheating, and flirting and dating through Whyville.
We have a new Whyville article out this month - a full journal article in the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Here's the abstract and reference with a link if you want the full article. It's about learning between peers across spaces (like an after school club and Whyville) and the creative methods we developed to trace it. You can also learn how to teleport, in case you didn't already know. :)
Fields, D. A. & Kafai, Y. B. (2009). A connective ethnography of peer knowledge sharing and diffusion in a tween virtual world, International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(1), 47-68.
http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1007/s11412-008-9057-1.
Abstract:
Prior studies have shown how knowledge diffusion occurs in classrooms and structured small groups around assigned tasks yet have not begun to account for widespread knowledge sharing in more native, unstructured group settings found in online games and virtual worlds. In this paper, we describe and analyze how an insider gaming practice spread across a group of tween players ages 9–12 years in an after-school gaming club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world called Whyville.net. In order to understand how this practice proliferated, we followed the club members as they interacted with each other and members of the virtual world at large. Employing connective ethnography to trace the movements in learning and teaching this practice, we coordinated data records from videos, tracking data, field notes, and interviews. We found that club members took advantage of the different spaces, people, and times available to them across Whyville, the club, and even home and classroom spaces. By using an insider gaming practice, namely teleporting, rather than the more traditional individual person as our analytical lens, we were able to examine knowledge sharing and diffusion across the gaming spaces, including events in local small groups as well as encounters in the virtual world. In the discussion, we address methodological issues and design implications of our findings.
I have upped my status in Whyville with a new car. I had lost my other second car after too much international travel last summer where I didn't remember to log into Whyville everyday to get my salary, my loan went into default and I eventually lost it. Yes, this can happen on Whyville.
So I saved money, putting most of it in cds (they earn 3% if you put them in for six weeks - they must be compounded quite a lot because I think I earned more in clams that I do on my cd with dollars) until a cool special edition car came out on Valentine's day. Note the nifty accessories - under car glow, why wheels (I was tempted with smiley face wheels but thought these fit the design better), roof rack, and lights. Complete with a license plate number. I didn't even know Whyville was an "island" until I read the title. And I paid in 'cash' (clams) so no need to make loan payments.
