Debriefing: The Plant Wars Community Chat

In my previous post I showed you the invitation I posted on the Plant Wars community forum. We had decided to host a community chat with Plant Wars players to see what we could learn. Our main goal was purposefully vague; we wanted to see what the players had to say about how the game is played.

Last night at 2 am our time and 8 pm Plant Wars time the long awaited event took place. Rachel and I were hopped up on caffeine and ready to go. Jon, the creator of Plant Wars, had generously donated seeds and donator days that we could use to sweeten the deal for our chat participants. I admit I got a little nervous at the beginning, but the chat was off and running in no time. Everyone treated each other with respect and we got some good ideas from the community.

A huge thanks to everyone who dropped in to contribute.

As promised, we would like to recognize and give “mad props” to the following Plant Wars players whose ideas and opinions helped make it all possible:

XstevenX – Thank you for your commitment to free speech, helpful advice, and pressing upon us to make the community chat happen.

Seraph – Your humor and stories delighted us, also thanks for helping make the community chat happen.

StrychninΞ – Your anecdote about being a mad social scientist within the game definitely won the anecdote competition.

Ðarren - Your initiation of the discussion on offensive behavior lead to proactive steps to add a block feature to the game.

Pooteh – Thanks for sharing about your Plant Wars playing.

samehdi – Your take on player behavior has been invaluable.

Rcraft – Thanks for your insight about the social interaction in Plant Wars.

KU2S – Thank you for your input.

Ҝudⱬu - Thanks for helping us out and answering our questions.

I would just like to add that our participants are awesome.

Tags: community chat, ethnographic methods, group chat, plant wars

What Ethnographers Do: The Art of the Email Interview

The internet is a many-splendored thing, and its advent and success has vastly expanded the reach of your average ethnographer. Information that we could once only access in face-to-face interactions can now be collected remotely, from across an ocean, across continents, across time and space. This is a great opportunity to learn more about people, largely unrestricted by geography and time.

However, it also presents a significant challenge. We have to develop new methods and tools to perform good remote ethnographies. In previous projects we have defaulted to Skype video calls–the next best thing, we thought, to in-person interviews. But when you live eight to ten time zones away from a participant, negotiating school, work, and leisure schedules to set up a Skype call can be nearly impossible. And, as much as we love our participants, at 3 am our time, we ethnographers much prefer to be sleeping.

The obvious solution to this was to develop an email interview. In our mind it had several advantages. It allowed the participant to respond to the questions in their own time, in a low-stress way. It removed the need for scheduling ninjitsu. And, it produced a ready-made transcript of the interaction, easing the field-note writing and analysis processes.

Our first iteration of the email interview was something like an open-ended survey. It explained the project and supplied the appropriate participant information and consent forms. Then, it listed the questions. It was in many ways a participant friendly version of the interview guide.

While the turnaround on the email interview surveys was really good from a time perspective, we felt that the answers we were getting were very short, to the point, and formal. This is in contrast to our in-person interviews, where answers to one question would often meander through several equally interesting subjects in the process of their completion.

So I thought a lot about how the in-person interviews were different from the email interviews, and I realized it was that with in-person interviews, the participant doesn’t know all of the questions you will be asking up front. Usually we tell them what kind of questions we will be asking, or what kind of information we are looking for, but the specific questions are unknown. As a result, the participant will often include a lot more information in the answer to each question. There was something about seeing all of the questions all at once that was cutting off this meandering; something about having all of the questions in front of the participant at once made the answers short and two the point.

So our solution was to send email interview questions one at a time.

This was a tremendous success. When we sent the questions one at a time, the answers were long, rich, and varied. Compare the two images below–the red circles surround answers to the same question.

We have tried out the second iteration of email interviewing on several participants, and have been blown away with their responses.

There are probably restrictions that come with this method. It is probably not appropriate for people who do not normally communicate via text-based mediums. (Our participants are very comfortable with the written communication of the internet, so in our case this has not been an issue.) It might also be less appealing to very busy executives–our coursemate Cora is doing a project with such folks, and she feels that her participants would become irritated with the process after three questions.

All things considered, however, we feel that the potential benefits of this method are numerous. Beyond the increased time that the participant has to respond to a question, there is also the increased time that the ethnographer has to consider the response, research, and contemplate a next question. While we thought that text would remove some of the richness present in non-verbal communication, we find that the opposite is true–for people who have grown up communicating via text, email, and chat, they are accustomed to explicizing the implicit, and often expand more on their feelings via text than they would likely do in person.

Finally, we feel it holds great promise for participants for whom an in-person interview would create a great deal of anxiety. This allows them time to answer the questions, and alleviates much of the pressure they might feel when faced with a note-scribbling, recording-toting ethnographer.

Tags: chat, design ethnography, digital ethnography, email, ethnography, methods, patterns of play, remote, techniques, text, typing, virtual ethnography

Plant Wars Community Chat

Today I posted an invitation for Plant Wars players to have a community chat about how Plant Wars is played. This idea grew from seeds planted (emphatically) by a couple of the Plant Wars admins who told me that one of the best ways to observe the players in their element is to see them chat in real time. By facilitating the discussion in the Plant Wars chatroom I hope to get some hive mind action going and see the players build ideas off each other. Wish me luck and if you play Plant Wars, I hope to see you there.

My invitation to Plant Wars Players to come have a chat. I wanted it to be whimsical and give the players a good laugh to encourage them to join.

Tags: community ethnography, ethnographic methods, participatory ethnography, plant wars

Quantitative: Why You Need Stories

I want you to take a look at these visualizations. These are all charts depicting what skill a Plant Wars player is training, as well as how many stat points they receive as a result of their fertilizing of their plant. (There is a direct correlation between the amount of fertilizer used and the stat points gained. More fertilizer = more statpoints. So, the size of the bubbles indicates both the number of stat points gained, as well as the amount of fertilizer used.) All of the charts are on the same time scale, and so you can compare them to each other vertically.

Now, what I want you to notice in these charts are the large white spaces, which are times with the player is not fertilizing (and indeed, likely not playing the game at all, possibly even sleeping). Notice that around June-July 2009, the location of the white spaces begins to migrate. (This is most obvious in Roger Shant’s graph).

Now, when I first noticed this down-time (I call it that since I don’t know if they are sleeping are not) migration, I assumed that someone had had a shift change at work, or started a new semester. However, after seeing the same pattern on the same timescale across four different players, I began to think something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I assumed that something had gone horribly wrong with my data. Somewhere in the processing, something was terribly, terribly wrong. Maybe the log files themselves were corrupted. However, after hashing this out with Jon and ruling out all of the potential causes we could think of, we decided that all of these players might actually have changed their schedules at the same time. Indeed, because they are all really active players, it’s possible that they were changing their down-time schedules because of each other.

However, it’s impossible to know without asking them.

I can speculate all day long on why this pattern appeared. I can talk myself blue in the face spouting ideas and hypotheses on what exactly caused this shift in down-time.

But I won’t know. In fact, I can’t know, not until I ask the players whose data I’m looking at. Only once I have the story to connect with the data will the patterns in the numbers make sense. Only when I have the story and the data can we paint a complete picture.

For instance, notice that large bubble that appears on all four charts? That was another weird thing in my data that I assumed was a mistake. I asked Jon about it, and apparently there had been a server issue which had potentially eaten the stat points that players had gained during the day. So, on that day he gave players a huge stat point reward for fertilizing, to compensate for the stat points that the server issue had deleted.

Tags: data visualization, design, ethnography, Jon, numbers, patterns of play, plant wars, quantitative, stories

Quantitative: A Look at the Big(ger) Picture

And now, for more data visualizations than you can comfortably shake a stick at. Here I have charted all of the fertilizes for January-March 2009. These are a little hard to read, because there’s so much information here, but take note of the sort of density spike in the middle of the chart. Basically it looks like a stalagtite hanging from the top of the middle of the chart, and a stalagmite growing from the bottom of the middle of the chart to meet the stalagtite from the top. This is particularly visible in the chart showing only the Attack and Defense trains. Well, as it turns out, that increase in activity came from a spammer on Facebook. Apparently, around that time someone ripped off Plant Wars to create a Facebook game, and then began spamming Facebook like crazy. This resulted in a significant increase in traffic to the real Plant Wars, and the accompanying increase in trains.

For the full story on the Facebook Plant Wars rip-off, read Jon’s blog post about it.

Tags: charts, data, data visualization, graphs, patterns of play, pictures, plant wars, quantitative, visualization

Quantitative: Some Plant Wars Player Patterns

We have some new visualizations for your viewing pleasure, this time of individual Plant Wars players!

In Plant Wars, players can increase their plant’s abilities by fertilizing, or “training”. Players can choose what ability they want to increase when they fertilize. Fertilizing Attack (referred to as Potency in the game) makes their plant’s attack stronger. Fertilizing defense (referred to as Girth in the game) makes their plant less suspectible to attack, while fertilizing speed (called Responsiveness in the game) makes their plant more agile and able to avoid attacks. When a player fertilizes, they occasionally have to successfully complete a CAPTCHA, a device to tell humans from computers. This weeds out cheaters. You can read more about the Plant Wars CAPTCHA here on Jon’s Plant Wars development blog.

Here, we have the training data of two Plant Wars players. One of the players is fairly new, having only been a member of the Plant Wars community for 100 or so days. The other player, a longer member, is now an admin.

Download the visualization PDF for a closer look!

Notice that recently, the only thing this new player has been training is Defense. This is possibly because of a Girth competition currently being held in the game. Also, notice the large blank spot from 12:00ish to 19:00ish. Nothing in happening there, so we think this is probably when the player is sleeping. (Otherwise, this player never to sleep and that blank spot is indicitative of work or school. However, given the way the blank spot travels later over time, we think it’s probably sleeping that the player is adjusting to the level of light as spring turned to summer.) Note that all times are Central time (ie, the same time as it is in Chicago, Dallas, or in this case, Tulsa, Oklahoma).

Download the visualization PDF for a closer look!

Our seasoned player takes a more methodical approach to training; he trains particular all day for several days in a row, and then moves to another skill. This appears to be a technique that he developed over time–in the early days of his tenure with Plant Wars, the kinds of skills he trained overlapped (take a look in the upper left hand corner to see that). Again, we think the blank spots are when this player sleeps, which seems to have changed over time–possibly because of a shift change.

A note on building the visualizations: these were once again processed from text log files using a Java program that I wrote, and then visualized using Excel. I’ve been experiementing with Prefuse Flare, but Flash doesn’t like large data sets one bit, so we’re kicking it old-school for the time being.

Tags: patterns of play, quantitative, visualization

Tiles in the Eyes of Children

Since we began this journey, into the world of gaming and its effect on the daily lives of people, Rachel and I have occasionally used the games played in our daily lives as a compass for looking at the abilities of games to crossover into new realms. Many times this has focused our thinking on how children see the whole world as a game and apply principles and techniques from games to real life situations.

Today I was shown a rendering of something that touches the core and essence of the Patterns of Play project. Its a two panel drawing entitled Tiles in the Eyes of Children by cartoonist Don Dimanlig, and it truly touched me.  It maybe hard to read but the caption in the middle says “In the eyes of children coloured tiles are islands, and white tiles are pitfalls.” I think the drawing speaks for itself.

In video games we have alternate realities created for us to explore, but children seem to do this naturally. In the Patterns of Play project we are excited to see emerging patterns of adults who are able to created their own instances of alternate realities and play within them, much like children in the supermarket.

Many thanks to Don Dimanlig for capturing so eloquently what we were thinking. Check out his deviantart page here.

What Ethnographers Do: Interview Guide

Part of the documentation we assemble before every project is an interview and observation guide. It’s supposed to serve as a checklist for supplies, as well as a guideline for how to conduct the interview. It includes the information we are trying to get at, as well as the questions we’re using to do so. Here is our interview guide for our current project. (If you would like a copy of our interview guide, you can download it here as a Word document, and here as a PDF.)

Tags: ethnographic primer, ethnography, guide, interview, observation

What Ethnographers Do: Data Management

One of the greatest challenges for ethnographers is what to do with all of the data we collect. In addition to the physical notebooks full of scratch notes, we also have lots of digital data–from audio recordings of interviews to photographs taken during observations to the field notes we write up after an interaction with participants. Organizing and securely storing the data is a difficult proposition; how can we arrange things so that we can find them, but so that they will still be safe? These are the solutions we’ve implemented for this project.

Moving Data Into the Cloud

Nothing makes me more nervous than only having one copy of a document. I am a big fan of frequent backups, or, even better, letting someone else worry about the persistence of my documents. Enter Google Documents. If you’re not familiar with Google Documents, it’s definitely worth a look. For simple (read: not flashy) office processing tasks, Google Documents provides a solid set of free tools, and allows you to store your documents on Google’s servers. This has numerous advantages.

Safety: Protect your files from hard drive failure

Hard drives are vulnerable, and laptop harddrives are particularly so. Drop them one too many times, get them a little too close to a refrigerator magnet, spill some soda on them, and in a blink, your precious data is gone. I much prefer to store my data on someone else’s servers. Google’s servers are the lifeblood of their business–if those servers fail catastrophically, Google loses catastrophic amounts of money. So they hire loads of people to look after the health and wellbeing of Google’s servers to ensure that no such thing happens. Because Google and my interests as far as server reliability are in line, I feel very comfortable storing my documents there.

Security: No need to transfer via insecure physical media

Storing documents there also means that you can access them from any computer with an internet connection, removing the need for potentially insecure physical storage devices. Flash drives (aka pen or thumb or jump drives) are very handy, it’s true, but not only are they easy to misplace–a data security nightmare–but they are also notorious for transmitting viruses from one computer to another.

Sharing: Easily share documents with other researchers across the world

In an increasingly global society, researchers often end up collaborating remotely. Instead of emailing back and forth different versions of a document, Google Documents allows you to share a single document and edit it simultaneously and collaboratively.

For this project, we are storing all of our field notes on password-protected Google Documents. However, Google Documents is not the only cloud service we are using; we are also using the WordPress servers to facilitate our data management. Our audio, video, and image files are stored privately on our WordPress project blog, which offers the same advantages I described above. For this project we are not using Flickr, but it is also a fantastic cloud service that will help you protect your pictures for posterity.

File Naming for Fun and Profit

When you have many, many files that have to be organized, it’s important to be methodical in their naming. The convention we are using for this project is as follows:

Description/ParticipantPsuedonym_DDMonYYYY_Location_City_Researcher’sIntials

(Researcher’s intials are only required if only one researcher is involved in the creation of the file, as in the second example below in which I recorded audio).

Since that’s a little opaque, here’s a couple of examples:

Field Note File: LucasBowser_15Jun2010_RTW_Dundee
Audio File: LucasBowserAudio_15Jun2010_RTW_Dundee_RS

Note that we never use a participant’s real name in the naming of a file–it is always the participant’s psuedonym.

Speaking of psuedonyms, let’s talk about how we keep track of all of the folks we talk to.

Participant Psuedonyms and Tracking Database

Alicia and I are using a particularly fun mechanism for arriving at participant psuedonyms for this project. Each participant gets one name from a video game character. Their other name is something evocative for us. We spend a little bit of time discussing the names we choose so that we both understand the thought process behind the name selection, and then the name becomes a memory tool for us, encapsulating more information.

For instance, if I were to develop a psuedonym for Alicia, I might come up with something like, “Lara Chopin”.

Lara comes from Lara Croft, an image of whom is currently Alicia’s computer’s desktop wallpaper. I’ve also seen Alicia dress up as Lara Croft from time to time (for Halloween or other fancy dress occasions). Further, Lara is similar to Laurey, the name of the heroine from the musical Oklahoma, which is a nod to Alicia’s birthplace.

Chopin was an intensely creative Polish pianist and composer, which pays homage to Alicia’s creativity but also to her heritage.

So, as the researcher, I would read “Lara Chopin” on a file name, and immediately remember that this is the Polish-American participant from Oklahoma who is very creative, and kind of a badass. It’s a helpful memory device.

However, this all needs to be recorded somewhere. So we have created a participant tracking database (as a spreadsheet on Google Docs, naturally) that maps the participant’s name to their psuedonym, and indicates whether they are all squared away on ethical and field note fronts.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, data management, design ethnography, ethnography, Flickr, Google, Google Documents, Wordpress

Playing Plant Wars: Participatory Ethnography, or in this case kicking ass!

One of the tools ethnographers use to understand the users or participants of a particular situation is called participatory ethnography. This means that we go and do what they do. In a traditional ethnographic project, for example ethnographers are brought into the factory to see how working conditions could be improved, the ethnographers would go into the factory and maybe work a few days in the different kinds of jobs. Basically you are putting yourself in your participants shoes.

In the case of this project that means we go and play Plant Wars, which is a stellar  thing to be doing and calling it work! Today I felt my first real rush of victory. I clobbered another plant!

This is an important part of our research because it helps us feel how it really is to play the game. We are doing much more than just thinking about how the interface is laid out or how the games community work. We are trying to really get to know why people play. Today I learned that with one little victory. Once you sink your teeth into a game and start feeling the accomplishment it hooks you. I want to be better at it. I want to become the best at it (though I know I will always be a low-level flunky compared to the Plant Wars superstars at the top of the battle ladder). Playing games like Plant Wars is definitely a  serious and necessary research activity. I love this project and Plant Wars.

This graphic made my victory really sink in and made me want more. Something about the blood spatter and the winning of the fight really got me pumped up, and I want to keep playing and winning. I think I am starting to feel more of what the rest of the Plant Wars players feel.

Tags: empathy, firsthand research, gaming, participatory ethnography, patternsofplay, plant wars