Suchergebnisse

World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants. In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes. Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

PurposeAn ensemble is an intermediate unit of work between action and activity in the hierarchical framework proposed by classical activity theory. Ensembles are the mid‐level of activity, offering more flexibility than objects, but more purposeful structure than actions. The paper aims to introduce the notion of ensembles to understand the way object‐related activities are instantiated in practice.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents an analysis of the practices of professional information workers in two different companies using direct and systematic observation of human behavior. It also provides an analysis and discussion of the activity theory literature and how it has been applied in areas such as human‐computer interaction and computer‐supported collaborative work.FindingsThe authors illustrate the relevance of the notion of ensembles for activity theory and suggest some benefits of this conceptualization for analyzing human work in areas such as human‐computer interaction and computer‐supported collaborative work.Research limitations/implicationsThe notion of ensembles can be useful for the development of a computing infrastructure oriented to more effectively supporting work activities.Originality/valueThe paper shows that the value of the notion of ensembles is to close a conceptual gulf not adequately addressed in activity theory, and to understand the practical aspects of the instantiation of objects over time.