City of Heroes
Game
Documents about City of Heroes
Whitepaper9 pages
Information Behavior and the Formation and Maintenance of Peer Cultures in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games: A Case Study of City of Heroes
This paper offers a conceptual framework for a planned study of how players in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) form and sustain small peer groups such as guilds, clans, and teams, using the massively multiplayer game City of Heroes as its case.
- The paper is an early-stage conceptual framework for a planned study, not a report of empirical results; its claims rest mainly on existing literature rather than new data.
- It proposes that play theory and information behavior theory (especially meaning-making) together can explain how MMORPG players form and sustain guilds, clans, and teams with their own rules and mores despite anonymity and missing offline social cues.
- The framework treats MMORPGs three ways: as games, as 'virtual sandbox' play spaces, and as cultures where knowledge, behavior, and artifacts are learned and negotiated.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper9 pages
Spontaneous Communities of Learning: Learning Ecosystems in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Environments
This doctoral research proposal examines how spontaneous communities of learning emerge within massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), using City of Heroes as its primary case.
- Massively multiplayer online games such as City of Heroes act as informal learning ecosystems where globally dispersed players self-organise to master complex environments.
- The authors argue that because mastery typically requires collaboration, players form symbiotic learning relationships that extend beyond the game into forums, chat channels, and face-to-face meetings.
- The framework draws on legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger), connectivism (Siemens), and distributed intelligence (Levy), positing that learning is best studied in naturally occurring contexts rather than formal classrooms.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper8 pages
Designing Goals for Online Role-Players
This paper, by Markus Montola of the University of Tampere, examines how persistent online worlds can be designed to serve role-players, a growing audience whose motivations differ from those of regular gamers.
- Role-players construct subjective fictional worlds (diegeses) and pursue goals chosen by their characters rather than goals encoded in game rules, and they often treat winning or losing as meaningless.
- The paper distinguishes exogenous goals (the player's own reasons), endogenous goals (built into game rules), and diegetic goals (belonging to the character's imagined world), arguing role-players largely disregard endogenous goals.
- It proposes six criteria for effective online role-playing goals: diegetic desirability, plausibility, sensibility, consequentiality, relative optionality, and sociality.
DiGRAJan 2005