Value Sensitive Design & Teaching Critical Thinking using WoW

VALUING TIME: a conceptual analysis of value sensitive design considerations related to a hypothetical proposal to teach critical thinking using World of Warcraft

Matt Rolph

INTRODUCTION

According to a recent press release from the game's publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, "since launching in November 2004, World of Warcraft has become the world's most popular MMORPG, with more than 10.9 million subscribers." The game is divided into servers, each containing a 'realm' or copy of the game world and hosting a maximum of approximately 30,000 players (with less than half of that number being optimal), of whom up to about 6,000 could be logged in at any given time, though lower numbers in the hundreds or thousands are more likely. Any challenge has the potential to provoke critical thought and, just as any real world meeting space could potentially serve as a classroom, any venue where people can interact over distance in chat and in virtual person has potential as a vehicle for educational purposes, but when we begin to consider teaching critical thinking inside WoW, a variety of value-related questions from a wide spectrum of stakeholders quickly arise. In this brief conceptual investigation of value sensitive design, we'll consider an initial proposal, identify the direct and indirect stakeholders, define the problem space associated with such a non-traditional experiment in online education, consider implicated time-related values, examine a handful of the associated conflicts and possible solutions, and see how the proposal would have to change in order to address the concerns of the majority of the stakeholders.

INITIAL DRAFT PROPOSAL FOR THE EXPERIMENT

I -- a teacher of critical thinking -- would spend a couple of hours a week inside WoW with a selected group of critical thinking students for a few months, observe them, and then ask them to reflect critically in writing on their experiences. I'd also ask them to participate on a dedicated social network / bulletin board website where they can ask each other questions, for help, message each other, etc., all on the record, and to make a note of any posts they make to outside sites, such as the official World of Warcraft forums. At the end of the process, I should have written data from each student, and also my observations of them in game. My expectations are that spending time reflecting on any experience can be valuable, and that my writing prompts will be also to evoke critical thought from most students, therefore that they will show improvement. Further, I assume that, as the game is engaging and a contemporary phenomenon, this approach might work where, for example, reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens together might be less effective (though I have great respect for that work and for the study of literature as a means of improving a variety of literacies).

From here, the proposal can be refined and considered using the conceptual aspect of value sensitive design.

IDENTIFYING STAKEHOLDERS

As with any game, the most immediately apparent stakeholders include the players, who compete with the game itself and with each other for progress, victories, and virtual goods, and the publisher, whose business it is to keep players there, attract more, and make real world money over time in the process. The phrase over time is key to our understanding, as a player is not simply one, fixed variable, but a person whose needs will change over time, one with whom the publisher specifically wishes to cultivate a long term relationship. As the term multiplayer suggests, players band together within the game in a variety of types of groups, something that has a pronounced effect on their experience of the game: a cohort, which we might define a group of people who are at roughly the same level in the game and thus share certain needs; a party, which is a short term association dedicated to meeting a particular objective; and a guild, which is a longer term association, in theory built around mutual needs and interests. In an educational experience, the most immediately apparent stakeholders are the students, whose forward progress is the stated purpose of the exercise, and the teacher, whose purpose it is to supervise the process and to evaluate and assess student progress and, in some cases, to deliver certain information, referred to as content. In our experiment, both students and teachers, in order to be present in the context, must become players in addition to their other roles, entering a relationship with the third party, the publisher.

Less direct stakeholders include player's peers, both those who are pro-game but who do not play this particular game and those who do not play this type of game at all; their parents and family, including present and future dependents; teachers and other educators, whose goal we presume it is to advance their educations outside of WoW; doctors and others focused on player health; representatives of government and others who fund and oversee education; player's current and future employers; other publishers and vendors, anyone who wants to market to players; and other members of society who coexist with players, including those who have very different aesthetic theories and values. Other people in society as a category might also include people who are in any sense competing with players and the publisher for resources at any level -- for example, competitors for the electrical power or for the resources used to create it, for the resources used to make and maintain the infrastructure of the internet, and so on.

VALUES

All stakeholders value time here, most specifically student/player time. Some are in general agreement about how time should be spent, as are, for example, the players, who usually want to play, and the publisher, who wants players to play (up to a certain point, as their managing their resources effectively relies on players' time in game falling within a certain range of activity), where all other stakeholders may be always or occasionally be in active competition for available time, and, in some cases, for other resources as well.

Let's deal with other resources first, as these competing demands are more easily addressed. In a democracy with a relatively free market, there are a number of parties who make use of the internet and pay for the privilege, and the number of nodes and connections continues to grow to meet demand; likewise, many vendors have an interest in selling the equipment necessary to connect to the game, which has a wide variety of other uses. It's also true that the typical American nuclear family, according to a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, are more likely to have the equipment:

Sixty-six percent of married-with-children households have a high-speed broadband Internet connection at home, ... well above the national average for all households of 52 percent. ... spouses and at least one child go online in 65 percent of married-with-children households and 58 percent of married-with-children households contain two or more desktop or laptop computers.

So although alternative uses for this infrastructure are conceivable, in the United States the market is likely to decide whether they'll prevail, and, even if they do, to support Blizzard's business model, i.e. allow the infrastructure to be used in more than one way, including playing games. One key to WoW's success may have to do with the minimum system requirements, which are far less demanding than many competitors (see appendix A). Many schools, however, have limited funds and thus fewer and older machines and also, out of concern for liability and as a matter of general policy, enforce rules that prohibit the installation of unapproved software and censor access to all but selected sites. It means that running this experiment in the context of a classroom or computer cluster would be far more difficult. Blizzard's terms of service require legal adulthood, though each subscriber may, at their discretion, allow "(1) minor child for whom you are a parent or guardian and whom you have authorized to use the account you create on the Service", meaning that parents would have to consent and subscribe or the students in the teaching-critical-thinking-in-WoW experiment group would need to be 18 or older. We'll consider the values of parents, teachers, doctors, and other adults in a moment, but we can already see that it is more difficult to run this experiment by the book with high school students.

That's probably okay, however, as survey data collected by the Daedalus Project in 2005 suggest that "the average age of the WoW player is 28.3 (SD = 8.4). 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Female players are significantly older (M = 32.5, SD = 10.0) than male players (M = 28.0, SD = 8.4)" Though we don't know the margin of error, and it's possible that, as the game's popularity has grown, these demographics have changed, it's likely that players are typically older than students in high school. They may even be older than typical undergraduates. It doesn't mean we couldn't run the experiment with students of any age, but this information supports some stakeholders’ reservations.

Returning to time as a value, there is general data of interest. The average human lifespan is about 71 years, with variations between genders (women tend to live longer). Of that time, men spend 10.5 years sleeping and women 27 years. Men spend three years, about 40 minutes a day, in the bathroom strictly for biological needs, and women spend only about six months. Women spend longer on the phone, 5.5 years compared to 4 for men, eating lunch, 4.5 years compared to 4, watching TV (at least in England, where this particular data set was gathered), at 13 years compared to 10, and also more years shopping, cooking, doing chores, and 'getting ready', which includes shaving, applying makeup, and so on. As you can see from this sample data, values are reflected in the way we spend our time, though we aren't necessarily aware of the way it adds up. Student time in school, however, is prescribed by statute or policy, and thus more carefully tracked. New York, according to the Thomas B. Fordham institute, has an average school day length of 6 hours, 54 minutes, amounting to 1,271 hours per year, a little more than average. For comparison, the average American youth spends 900 hours in school (and 1500 hours per year watching television, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. -- though television viewing numbers are changing, the average American still watches for 4 hours a day or 9 out of 65 years). This changes, of course, in college. At an accredited college or university, credit totals for each course roughly reflect the numbers of hours spent in the classroom or laboratory, with a 3 credit class requiring, in theory, about 3 hours per week in class. Faculty expect that for each hour in class, a student will spend a certain amount of time in study, reading, preparing, and completing homework assignments. The First Year Council at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH, found in Spring 2005 that most faculty believed they required 3-5 hours or more outside class per classroom hour and most fulltime students (taking an average of 5 classes) reported spending less than 10 hours per week outside class on all of their classes, i.e. 2 hours per class per week.

On average, again from the Daedalus Project survey, "WoW players spend 22.7 (SD = 14.1) hours per week playing the game ... [with] no gender differences in hours played per week."

The concept of opportunity cost is drawn from economic theory, and presumes that when a choice is made -- in our case, the choice to spend time in a particular way as opposed to another -- there is a cost that can be compared to the cost or benefit of other available options. Although the stakeholders we've identified are not likely to be trained economists, they are likely to instinctually grasp this concept of opportunity cost, and, if they all value time as we've suggested, they will perceive an analytical cost-benefit comparison through the filter of their other values.

LIKELY STAKEHOLDER CONCERNS

Student/players, students who also play the game, may welcome a chance to play on the record, and to receive credit for reflecting on their experiences. Some few, however, express concern regarding their own time management skills and the addicting nature of the game: "I'm worried about being sucked back in." The question of addiction comes up when considering other stakeholders at well, as we'll see in a moment. To be sensitive to students who are concerned about their ability to manage their time and their susceptibility to addiction, whether or not the term is clinically appropriate, we'd need to screen students in our test group, asking them to attest that they are not now and have not been in the past unable to control the amount of time they spend in the game. The question of game addiction would need to be evaluated, and a determination about informed consent reached by the institutional review board, human subjects committee, or comparable body. If the experiment falls outside such oversight for any reason, the teacher and any others engaged in this research must consider the ethical questions raised by the possibility of addiction. A self-selected group as opposed to a random sample does mean that the data gathered may be skewed.

Blizzard, the game's publisher, wants subscribers, and nothing in our proposal violates their terms of service. In order to play together, to be in the game world at the same time, players will need separate accounts. If we were considering anything involving account sharing, in which more than one student used the same account (only possible if we intended for them to access the game asynchronously) or if we intended to give minors access to the game without the consent of their guardians, only then might Blizzard be concerned, should they get wind of our plans. As we've noted, the publisher wants players to spend time in the game, with few restrictions. Though it's possible to imagine a company forbidding an activity that might result in negative criticism of their game (students are asked to reflect and could write anything they wish), this one is confident enough about its product to allow fans and players to comment freely on the public internet even in cases where their terms of service, which specify trademark and copyrights to game characters, concepts, and so on, might be used in an attempt to suppress commentary.

The teacher is also a player, and, in theory, will have the same concerns as other players. The teacher overseeing the experiment would need to be someone comfortable with something along these lines, with access to the appropriate equipment and so on. Again, this brings bias into the mix, as a person willing to try this is more likely to view it in a favorable light. Teaching is a time-consuming business, and teachers are generally concerned with efficient and effective use of time. What is defined as effective often depends on the method of assessment and the context. In contexts where the teacher can evaluate and assess independently, as in more common at the college level and above, tolerance for risk is greater. If the students’ progress is to be determined by a standardized assessment, such as the California Critical Thinking Exam, the teacher may be much more concerned about whether this will be a wise experiment. In the absence of solid research supporting the experiment, i.e. studies equating these activities with improved exam scores, a teacher may be averse to spending time in this way. Teachers are also political animals, and, though methodologies and pedagogy vary, tend to be uniformly concerned with the other stakeholders concerns: at the high school level, "the kids may go for this, but I need to be able to explain it to the parents, the principle, or the school board" and at the college level "I want to be sure my class is not seen as a b*****it class, as a waste of time." The participation of the teacher is likely to be perceived as an endorsement of the game whatever he or she says. Many indirect stakeholders are likely to believe that medicine should be bitter, that rigorous education should not be fun or that because their own educations were not pleasurable, no good education can be, and winning over these people can be a challenge. Some teachers may have chosen their work out of unconscious or conscious motivation to be the center of attention, something that would be less likely if the tools used are more engaging. On the other hand, at the college level, an untenured instructor may feel the need to "publish or perish", to have conducted, document, and published on experiments, whether or not they directly benefit other stakeholders. Though it would be unethical to conduct research on students at the expense of their educational progress, it can be difficult to parse the various imperatives, especially in a case where the experiment has yet to be conducted. If the expectation is that the students will be more engaged, and the teacher believes, as I do, that engagement is key to learning, tolerance for the opportunity cost is increased. If the IRB approves the experiment and there is a chance it could result in a line on a curriculum vitae or publicity, self-justifying rationalizations are easier. In brief, this experiment is more likely in higher education than elsewhere.

Parents and family, including present and future dependents, have a stake in the player's use of time as well. If the players/students find themselves spending 14-23 hours a week in the game, a complete consideration of the opportunity cost including all of the other things they might be doing. Parent oriented publications are full of warning about the dangers of WoW like this one:

July 2008 - My son is 17 and was recently diagnosed w/ ADHD and LD by a neuropsychologist. We had him tested because we were concerned about his grades, which had been very good, but curved down to bottom by junior year. He is very intelligent, but does very little homework. He sees a therapist, a learning specialist and has a 504 plan at BHS. He plays World of Warcraft compulsively. Treatment by his therapists does not seem to help him come to the realization that his gaming is a problem. When we (the parents) take away the game, he goes on strike and doesn't go to school. Questions: Does anyone have any experience with World of Warcraft addiction? If so, what has helped your child? Are there any local therapists who specialize in this? What about residential treatment or boarding schools? I am at wit's end. Any advice or sharing of experience would be appreciated. Anon

Radical treatment is needed here. Get rid of his computer, admittedly difficult to do. Electronic screens in general, have become the malaise of American children. Call the BUSD attendance office and/or the Berkeley Police if necessary. It is nothing to feel shy or stigmatized about. You can't let your son control the situation. You need to rein him in. My own son has a degree of computer addiction (racing games). I sent him away to camp for 9 weeks this summer, largely to get him away from the computer. Bill Gates lets his daughter use the computer 45 minutes on school nights and 1 hour on weekend nights. If that's enough time for Bill Gates' child, it's enough time for our sons. Best of Luck and Don't Be Reticent! Berkeley Teacher and Mother

Of course, there are also a variety of more moderate answers and strategies. American parents are dealing with this and other situations in a broad spectrum of ways. Another parent quotes experts and points to resources:

First, Iowa State psychology professor Douglas Gentile says there are red flags to watch for when it comes to any video game addiction. It's not the hours, he says, it's the impact on the rest of life. ... World of Warcraft was a hot topic on a recent Q&A session we ran with CSU Dominguez Hills professor Larry Rosen, author of ''Me, Myspace and I'' (great book, by the way),Walnut Creek therapist Steven Freemire and Times video games blogger Danny Willis -- and Danny raised some particularly interesting points about why forcing a teen to go cold-turkey meets with the reception that, well, you've experienced. He says parents tend to think of these games like virtual solitaire, when they're more like varsity football. They're played in teams, so if your son doesn't show up to play, he's letting down real people to whom he made a commitment. So it may be helpful when you talk to your son, if you understand that to him, it's like being yanked off the varsity football team, or told he can only go to two practices a week -- in which case, the team will dump him. Your discussion will go better if he gets that you get it. Or at least, the door may not be slammed quite as hard.

Though there are reported cases in the mainstream press where WoW brings couples closer together (A Happy Warcraft Tale: http://www.worldofwar.net/n/415359/a-happy-warcraft-tale) or makes students more interested in school ('World of Warcraft' Gets Kids Interested in School by Jeremy Tsu: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,432383,00.html), fear tends to predominate. In a system where some schools or districts still ban books in deference to parent concerns, we can see that not everyone will accept or endorse our proposed experiment. The long term solution likely lies in discussions that involve parents, teachers, students, and others, and focus on facts, attempt to differentiate between more and less rational fears. In the shorter term, it's appropriate to build consensus and be sensitive, even if anxieties seem disproportionate or irrational.

Doctors today have general concerns about trends in obesity, which is epidemic in the US, and overall health, and some have specific concerns about WoW or comparable games. Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack, a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, claims that 40 percent of World of Warcraft players are addicted to the game. Dr. Orzack is the founder and coordinator of Computer Addiction Services, and likens computer addiction, also called internet addictive disorder or cyberaddiction, to pathological gambling and compulsive shopping. She recommends treatment using cognitive therapy, and that games bear warnings similar to cigarette packets. Though her publications on the subject seem to be from about a decade ago, the AMA does not quite recognize video game addiction as a distinct disorder, and the methodology she used to derive the 40% figure is not clear, she makes some very good points about the way MMORPG use variable ratio reinforcement to keep players engaged. "This isn't about willpower or restraint," she is quoted as saying, "These games are very elaborately designed to ease you in gently, entice you, and keep you there. And it's a cycle: people begin to spend too much time playing and their careers and personal relationships begin to deteriorate." Different types of doctors have different career arcs and different concerns, and careers in psychology can be made by speaking to an anxiety that is on the rise as opposed to one that is on the decline, but it is legitimate to consider the health concerns associated with our proposed experiment. Again, it means selecting a group that is prepared to sign an informed consent form, one made up of people from, if Dr. Orzack's figure is correct, the other 60%. We may also want to discuss screening for other things, in theory, such as obesity, depression, anxiety, and so on, noting that these are incredibly common in adolescence and early adulthood. To moderate concerns, we could run this experiment in conjunction with, for example, the requirement that participants engage in regular exercise. Exercise tends to have many positive effects, and, according to some research, to raise test scores on seemingly unrelated assessments.

Government is slow, but responsive to the concerns of the citizenry. It would be difficult to convince regressive school boards this is worthwhile, and current state and national law require particular forms of assessment. If this research can be conducted at the college level and it can be shown to have positive results across the board, then progress is possible, or, at least, we may be able to impede policy and law that prohibit this sort of thing. Uniformly positive results, however, are unusual and suspicious. Reliable data is likely to be more ambiguous.

Current employers would likely rather have the student learn something more directly applicable to their work. Future employers may be a little more open, as technical skill sets, work at distance, and achieving objectives in virtual environments may be more valuable in some sectors in the future. To address employer concerns, we'd need to focus on the aspects of the game that may incidentally prepare student players for work, such as in-game economics. We may also need to strongly suggest that our participants limit their time in game to far less than the average number of hours per week in favor of other activities. We could, for example, require participants to earn the money necessary to subscribe to the game themselves.

Finally, there are the other people in society who must coexist with the players. Dr. John Charlton of the England's University of Bolton and Ian Danforth of Whitman College in the United States suggest, on the basis of their research (sample included 391 players, 86% male), that "the closer the players got to [game] addiction the more likely they were to display negative personality traits. With stronger signs of game addiction came three personality traits that would usually be associated with Aspergers: neuroticism and lack of extraversion and agreeableness" (reported by Gamepolitics.com). Dr. Charlton is quoted as saying "The thinking in the field is that there is a scale along which people, even those considered to be 'normal', can be placed upon. And that people such as engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists are nearer to the non-empathizing, systemizing, end of the spectrum, with people with Aspergers syndrome even further along again. ... Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming." The implication is that game addiction makes people less sociable. On the other hand, MMO are collaborative platforms and reinforce many basic skills of the "everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten" variety. To be value sensitive, we need to carefully consider the experiment design, but, as we're screening to decrease the likelihood of reinforcing or creating addictions and this is a group project, it should be relatively simple to make the work collaborative. We can, for example, prompt students to reflect on the benefits of working with another or with a group to achieve an objective, in addition to allowing free reflective writing. This risk of Aspergers-like symptoms appears to be manageable.

THE REDESIGNED, MORE VALUE SENSITIVE EXPERIMENT PROPOSAL

A qualified teacher, a qualified therapist, and a group activity leader will invite students to be screened for a critical thinking experiment that will involve playing World of Warcraft. To be accepted student players must indicate that they will abide with the terms of participation, that they will take a standardized critical thinking examination (such as the International Critical Thinking Essay Test from the Foundation for Critical Thinking) to be scored by external evaluators at the beginning of the program and at the end, to earn the money the game subscription will cost either in group community service organized by the experiment's leaders or at a part-time job, and to state that they do not believe themselves to be or to have been addicted to online games. Participants will be briefed on the risks and sign an informed consent form. The group activity leader will be in charge of a light group (physical fitness) exercise program in which all participants are expected to participate. The therapist will review what participants write, meet with participants individually to discuss their progress through the program, and have the power to remove students from the program at any time. The teacher will discuss program objectives, and be on hand in the game world to observe and participate. Students are asked to play at designated times during the week and to work together to meet certain objectives within the game, then to reflect in writing, both in response to prompts written by the teacher and freely, at particular times during the experiment. Students are asked to agree not to play WoW except at these designated times, totaling a maximum of an agreed upon number of hours per week (say 3-6), and to reserve the characters they create in this program for use in this experiment. At the end of the experiment, student writing and test scores, along with teacher, therapist, and group activity leader research notes, will be aggregated into a data set to be made available for external review.

CONCLUSIONS

As you can see, the result of the conceptual investigation and sensitivity to the likely concerns of the direct and indirect stakeholders increases the specificity, and, perhaps, the quality of the proposed experiment. While it may still provoke anxiety in some quarters, and there are questions that this experiment will be less likely to answer as a result of the limited sample, it is arguably much more likely that the students involved will learn more. Whether their critical thinking skills will improve measurably or not, they'll become more aware of the discussion about the risks of online games, and have spent time reflecting individually and working together on virtual and real tasks. It is much harder to describe the refined proposal as reckless, and it is far more likely to appeal to the concerned stakeholders. There are cases in which sensitivity to too many stakeholders and their values can be paralyzing, but this is not one of them. This type of process can be used to consider and refine almost any design or endeavor.

Appendix A:

Minimum System Requirements
Windows® System 2000/XP OS:
Intel Pentium® III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800 MHz
512 MB or more of RAM
32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ 2 class card or above
DirectX® 9.0c (included) and latest video drivers
6.0 GB available HD space
4x CD-ROM drive
A 56k or better Internet connection

Mac® OS X 10.3.9:
933 MHz or higher G4, or G5, or Intel processor
512 MB RAM or higher; DDR RAM recommended
ATI or NVIDIA® video hardware with 32 MB VRAM or more
6.0 GB available HD space
4x CD-Rom drive
56k or better Internet connection

Appendix B:

World of Warcraft: What is it?

· World's #1 selling "massively multiplayer" online role-playing game [MMORGP]

· Player Experience
o A "virtual reality" fantasy where thousands of players embark on adventures and discover a world together inside the rich Warcraft universe
o An escape from the routine, everyday world into a land of epic fantasy where you have the freedom to explore, be anyone you want, establish powerful social connections, and accomplish great tasks

· Technical Foundation
o Client/Server network game
o 'Game' resides in code and databases on servers
o Client renders the game on players' computer screens
o 9,000 Blizzard servers globally supporting WoW
o Over 1,300 Game Masters provide 24x7 customer support in 6 languages directly to player while playing the game

[Omitted chart: WoW customers in millions by quarter, east and west]

Published by Blizzard-Vivendi 2006


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