PopCosmo – Index
Math as Narrative in WoW Forum Discussions
Constance Steinkuehler & Caroline C. Williams
Research Project Overview
Since 2005, we have been exploring the forms of cognition and learning that go into everyday gameplay in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) – online videogames played collaboratively in simulated fantasy worlds. Our research focuses on commercially successful game titles such as Lineage II, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and RuneScape because our main goal is to better understand the kinds of thinking and learning that young people and adults do in their out-of-classroom lives and how those activities intersect (or fail to intersect) with more formal forms of education (like institutions, classrooms, and tests). [Read more →]
Data Collection
In an earlier study of informal scientific reasoning (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2009), we gathered a large representative sample of World of Warcraft discussion forum posts (1984 randomly-selected posts over 85 discussion threads) and analyzed the science-related problem solving behaviors evidenced therein. The results were surprising: 86% of the posts were focused on social knowledge construction… [Read more →]
Data Analysis
Our approach to analysis draws heavily on the work of Gee (1996, 1999) and Labov (1972) as well as basic mathematics (algebra, arithmetic). [Read more →]
General Observations
Within 31 lines of text, the author manages to present a mathematical model for the claim that “shadow has crap scaling,” including computational evidence that his model (and therefore claim) is correct – not in the format of a standard mathematical proof but rather in the form of a story.
Scaling, the primary topic of the argument, is an emergent property that arises at an intersection of complex systems within the game. Scaling lends itself to mathematizing by the community as they attempt to figure out ways to predict how the dynamic works in order to play in ways that maximizes various positive characteristics. But why narrative?
One explanation may lie in the fact that stories, like mathematical equations, are models of the world. As Bruner (2002) notes, “To tell a story was to issue an invitation not to be as the story is but to see the world as embodied in the story. In time, the sharing of common stories creates an interpretive community” (Bruner, 2002, p. 25).
Nowhere is this made clearer than in the evaluation sections (Labov, 1972) where the author staves off the “so what?” question again and again to tell us the moral of the story: in lines 7-8 of the orientation, in lines 18-19 of the complicating action section, and in line 20 & lines 25 of the resolution section. Each evaluation throughout the post effectively stitches the development of the mathematical argument to the developing narrative drama to iterate and reiterate the assertion appearing in the post’s title.
A diagram of the overall structure (below) of this mathematical argument as narrative reveals its elegant design. Its discursive organization draws parallels between the Mindflay spell and the Frostbolt spell that reinforce comparison between the two character classes they represent: shadow priests versus mages. This structure of the text draws a constant balance between the two classes that serves to accentuate the imbalance of the scaling factors themselves.
What this worked example illustrates is the unstable nature of genres (if not whole domains) kept traditionally separate and distinct in formal academic institutions yet blended and merged in everyday uses such as these. Here, we see a blend of math with narrative – two domains which could not be more adamantly held separate in educational environments – not as a mistaken byproduct of sloppy form but as a best-fit solution to the problem of building a rhetorically persuasive model not just for the self-styled “Elitist Jerks” who like to math things up from time to time, but for the storytellers and general players too.
References
Bruner, J. (2002). Making stories: Law, literature, life. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd Ed.). London: Routledge/Falmer.
Gee, J. P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York: Routledge.
Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city: Studies in the black English vernacular (pp. 354-396). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Steinkuehler, C. & Duncan, S. (2009). Informal scientific reasoning in online virtual worlds. Journal of Science Education & Technology. DOI: 10.1007/s10956-008-9120-8.