Tacit Knowledge in Virtual Worlds

Today's guest post is by Travis Ross, a very gifted Grad Student working with Ted Castronova.  I got the chance to meet him on the Arden project, and most recently at Ludium II.  His post gets at some of the core concepts of online interaction. - ron

I have been thinking for sometime now about the possibilities of tacit learning in virtual worlds. Throughout my graduate studies I have been bombarded by problems of knowledge management within organizations. Much of it has been talk about how organizations can attempt to capture explicit or tacit knowledge. First off, what are tacit and explicit knowledge? My disclaimer here is that this blog post does not create fully operational definitions of “Explicit” and “Tacit” knowledge. However, they serve my purpose, to give us a starting point from which to examine these ideas.

Explicit knowledge will be defined as: knowledge that can be recorded and documented.

And tacit knowledge will be defined as: knowledge that can’t be recorded or documented and is part of the culture of an organization.

Within virtual worlds recording explicit knowledge is easier; it can be recorded using various information sources including video and sound, but mostly text, then presented in world or on the web. As search technologies increase in sophistication explicit knowledge only becomes easier to search and tag. A good example of this would be the creation of interactive world maps with meta-data being used to create way-points.

Tacit knowledge on the other hand is more difficult. Tacit knowledge must be learned in by participating within the community. Work on this has been done by Brown and Duguid and continued onto virtual worlds with Steinkuhler's work on apprenticeship. So, assuming that tacit knowledge exists within virtual worlds, why should we care about it?

Mulligan and Patrovsky has pointed out in their book "developing online games", that players who have a positive social interaction in the first 3 months of play are more likely to stay. I think that most MMO players and developers will agree with me that it is often the social bonds formed by players, rather than the game play itself, that keeps players involved in a world. If WoW was a single player game, how many times could you really run the "karazhan" end game instance of World of Warcraft by yourself? We know we want players to form social bonds.

For the new player in a virtual world, especially one who has never played in any virtual world before, meeting new people and having the confidence to interact within a new culture can often be intimidating. Even though humans form social bonds very naturally, not only does the individual game have its own unique culture, but the online gaming community as a whole has its own culture as well. The players come to understand the rules and social norms of this culture through tacit knowledge learning. Explicit knowledge can help the player learn to navigate and become a more efficient player in the world, but it can not teach these rules and norms. For example, it is one thing to read and comprehend what it is like to play in groups ("I just read a guide on how to be a tank. OK, now I can do it.") it is another thing to actually do it. New players break social norms and misunderstand subtle cues that experienced players take for granted.

All developers of virtual worlds are concerned with player retention. As I pointed out previously, new players are more likely to stay if they have a positive social experience and also that experiencing a new (Even if it is English Speaking American) culture for the first time can be intimidating. Explicit knowledge (reading the manual, browsing websites, engaging in chat) only takes a new player so far. In order to have an experience that integrates the player more deeply into the culture players need to participate in social interactions that teach tacit knowledge. Providing experienced players with incentives to share tacit knowledge will allow developers to reap these benefits and increase the retention rates of those new slightly intimidated players. The question I will leave you with and one that still eludes me is how do we create gameplay that rewards tacit knowledge sharing?

Travis Ross
Indiana University
Synthetic World Initiative
Community Manager - Arden: World of William Shakespeare
Ph.D. Student - Indiana University School of Telecommunications

Comments

[Will]

Hey, Travis. You raise an important question. I think the obvious answer is to reward players for doing things that transfer tacit knowledge. For example, A Tale in the Desert has quests that require experienced players to return to newbie zones in a mentoring role.

[Matt]

"it is one thing to read and comprehend what it is like to play in groups ("I just read a guide on how to be a tank. OK, now I can do it.") it is another thing to actually do it. New players break social norms and misunderstand subtle cues that experienced players take for granted."

it's interesting to raise this one tier higher on the phenomenological scale... what does this mean toward the distinction of simulation-based learning (tacit and explicit) and corporeal learning? There's the difference between reading tanking instructions and learning through experience; then there's the difference between learning, for instance, cooperation team management in a virtual world, or learning the same through physical, face-to-face interaction

Tacit knowledge, to me, sounds like anything from acculturation to ideology? Funny that a child can become street-wise on a virtual street long before he's buying his own pants ;)

[Bliargh]

so we can look at a medic in the military...

learning (corporeal experience)

virtual learning (priesting in wow)

virtual virtual learning (reading a faq on priesting in wow)

virtual virtual virtual learning (browsing faq forums to learn how to write a faq on priesting in wow)

virtual virtual virtual virtual learning (reading the comments section of a blog posting to learn about browsing faq forums to learn how to write a faq on priesting in wow?)

nah, i'd say add one 'virtual' preface to each member of this list and we'd be getting closer to a point of some kind ;)

[jeremy snyder]

i think will kind of hit on the same response that came to me - it's all about the player interaction. the thing is that even if you meet someone from your same real-world cultural group, if they are already more established (e.g. n00b/established player interaction) they are perceived as being part of a new culture, because they are immersed in the game or virtual world culture. consider that the newbie is still learning about guilds, sims, etc, which all make up the new culture. so that's one aspect - get new players into the culture thru contact with older players.

aside from that, i think any in-world actions that help them learn the history of the world as well as important avatars would be helpful. i think that requires having older players not only interacting with newbies but serving as part of the quest mechanics.

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