sense-making in virtual worlds -- a study design

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Reinhard (2009) Sense-making in virtual worlds P a g e | 1

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, PhD Roskilde University Virtual Worlds Research Project © 2009

Sense-making in virtual worlds: How individuals’ making-sense of attempts to innovatively deliver entertainment relates to their interpretation of entertainment value

Introduction

What is entertainment? Is it something inherent in the media product, a quality

imbued in a book, a movie, a video game by the designer? Is it the interpretation of the

media product by the reader, the viewer, the player of how valuable the product is as an

entertainment source? Or is it a combination of the two: what features designed to be

entertaining are interpreted as such for what people at what time?

The purpose of this study is to explore these questions in the context of virtual

worlds, sense-making, and innovation. With the rise of digital media and advancement of

the internet as a distribution medium, there are increasingly more media products being

offered as sources of entertainment. The digital age of media has given us video games,

computer games, massive multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual social games, and

so forth. But how entertaining are these innovations in delivery systems seen compared to

more traditional media, such as movies? In other words, how do people make sense of the

innovations in entertainment as having entertainment value to them, and how does the

perception of entertainment value relate to their engaging with that media product?

Literature Review

Engaging with media products.

Academics and media industry professionals have been interested in the question of

why people choose the media products they do for over a century now. Academics

approach the question from a variety of perspectives and embed the question with other

questions, such as how the media impacts people. Professionals, in the capitalistic

structure, attempt to answer the question so as to argue for supporting the production and

distribution of certain media products over others. As the number of media technologies

expanded, increasing the amount and variety of venues for entertainment, answering this

question has become increasingly imperative. Academics and professionals seek to

understand the “fragmentation” for the complimentary and mutually sustaining reasons. For

academics, new concepts like personalization and isolation are locations for consternation

about the impact of the media on individuals and societies. For professionals, co-optation

and synergism are attempts to further gain control over the marketplace. The actions of the

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one group feed into those of the other; the results of academics provide professionals with

ideas, and the actions of professionals provide academics with new fields of research.

Various academic and industry approaches have been applied to understand the

people who engage with the media, and the various questions that encircle their engagings.

Industry professionals have traditionally used sociodemographics like age and gender to

understand who uses what, when and where, and academics have responded by looking at

such categories from a critical perspective (Reinhard, 2008). Academics have employed

uses-and-gratifications to understand the motives behind engagings, to the extent that some

in the industry are now looking at more psychological, or psychographic, answers to their

questions (Napoli, 2008).

The tendency in these traditions has been to study media use as an aggregate, to

look for averages over time and space (Reinhard, 2008). However, to focus only on

averages is to negate nuances, to divorce engaging with media products from the context in

which the understanding and application of the media product occurs; that is, to remove the

media product from the situation in which the media product may have had some importance

to the person using it. Instead of following the aggregate approach, the approach advocated

here is situationality – to understand how the media product is understood and applied within

the situation in which it is used. This approach has proven to be an effective addition to

traditional approaches to show more nuances in Dervin and Song (2005), Reinhard and

Dervin (2007), and Reinhard (2008).

Entertainment value.

As mentioned above, designers and producers are often seen as determining what

value a media product has on the polarity of entertainment and information. News,

documentaries, educational games have traditionally been classified as non-fiction and thus

intended to be informational to consumers. Drama, comedies, non-educational games have

traditionally been classified as fiction and thus intended to be entertaining to consumers.

What category the product is meant for is determined prior to distribution by the product’s

creators. There is less recognition for the role the individual in decoding the value of a

media product as one or the other, or the possibility of situations existing in which a specific

media product (i.e. specific movie, television show, website, game, etc) is evaluated as

having both1. When this possibility is considered, media products are termed “infotainment”,

conceptualizing an informational message that has entertaining components for the purpose

of education or persuasion, or to increase consumption of more traditional news formats.

1 There are examples of studies that indicate the overlap within a single media text of both information and entertainment gratifications: Davis (2003); Dervin & Song (2005); Reinhard (2008). The consideration of the internet and/or World Wide Web as providing both entertainment and information simultaneously is not discussed here, as that media product is a channel through which specific media texts are distributed. A delivery system structure cannot be ascribed as being just one or the other; only the content distributed through it can.

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The belief is that making something more entertaining will improve the information’s

probability of being consumed and/or accepted and acted upon.

However, just because something is supposed to be entertaining does not mean it

will be. This is a fairly obvious argument as that not all people find the same thing

entertaining at the same time – if they did, there would be no need to predict what, when,

where, how often, why people use the media they do. At the same time, what the designers

and producers intended to be entertaining could be informational, and vice versa. Social

learning and cultivation theories are predicated on the belief that people learn how to behave

in a society based on entertainment media, from cartoons to dramas. At the same time,

documentaries and non-fiction programming can be very entertaining and have fanbases as

much as fictional programming. Indeed, at some times, a person can find a media product

to be both informational – in that it helps with his or her life at the time – as well as

entertaining.

Instead of assuming that a media product is one or the other, the interpretive

perspective of the media user should be sought in how he or she makes sense of a media

product as informative or entertaining. This project focuses on the individual’s sense of a

media product as having an entertainment value to him or her at the time of engaging with

the media product.

Virtual worlds.

The most basic and agreed upon definition of a virtual world is that it consists of

some non-physical space rendered in three dimensions in which people, represented

through avatars, interact with one another (Bell, 2008; Schroeder, 2008). This definition has

traditionally been applied to MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) and

MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments), although sometimes the definition can also be

extended to MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and digital games for gaming consoles or

computers. As technology improves to portray and disseminate virtual worlds, so do the

amount and variety of them found on the internet. Some, such as Second Life, can be seen

as subsets of the internet, an alternative means of communicating without the structure

established by the World Wide Web. As the presence of virtual worlds increase, so do the

attempts to understand them as both complex social and cultural environments and as

media products intended to deliver entertainment and information.

The focus of this study is on virtual worlds as a media product intended to be an

entertaining diversion for media users. In this sense, virtual worlds represent an attempt to

technologically innovate upon other entertainment delivery methods, or Entertainment Media

Products. As such, virtual worlds may be consumed, or not consumed, for a variety of

reasons. These reasons may or may not be similar to the reasons for engaging with other

Entertainment Media Products. However, given the technological innovation and the

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requirements for engagement structured into the design of such worlds, there may be

reasons unique to them. The interface technology, the learning curve to engage with the

product, and the interaction required to consume the content could be related to how the

media product is engaged. What is less known is how the structure of a media product

interacts with the desires of the individual to influence his or her engaging with that product.

This study hopes to understand how people make sense of the entertainment values of the

innovations of Entertainment Media Products.

Sense-Making experiments.

Rarely will an experiment attempt to understand a person’s selection of

entertainment, or the decision-making process, due to the conceptualization of experiments

as locations for measuring behavior and behavior-related cognitions and affectations that

occur from the exposure to a specific stimulus. Experiments can be understood in social

sciences as gauging the reactions to people to the introduction of stimuli under controlled

conditions into their lives. The traditional approach to gauge this reaction is founded in

behavioral psychology.

However, an constructivist and interpretivist approach can be applied to understand

experiments as a social construction of activities and expectations as the “experimental

subjects” subject the artificiality of the experiment to their everyday lives; that is, to

understand how people make sense of the stimuli of the experiment as if each exposure to a

stimuli was a unique case study for which the mechanisms of understanding are recorded for

analysis and comparison (Lin, 1998).

To measure choice, individuals must be exposed to several stimuli, and their sense-

making of these choices must be measured. In other words, individuals should be exposed

to several stimuli and then asked to make sense of their reactions to these stimuli and

discuss their predilections towards them. Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) can

be applied as a systematic approach to record the reactions of experimental subjects in way

that accounts for their interpretations of the experiment’s activities and expectations. Thus,

to understand people’s engaging with innovative Entertainment Media Products (EMPs),

people will be exposed to four types of EMPs in laboratory settings, and Dervin’s SMM will

be utilized to investigate how people make sense of the EMPs’ entertainment value.

Research Questions

The goal of this study is to experimentally investigate how media products that vary

in their technological innovation are seen as being entertaining. Thus, the main research

questions are:

How do people make sense of Entertainment Media Products?

How does a change in the structure and parameters of Entertainment Media

Products impact the determination of the media product’s entertainment value?

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How do the people’s determination of a media product’s entertainment value relate to

their engaging with the media product?

How does this approach to an experiment compare to other approaches in the

amount and quality of information gained about media engagings?

Method

Sample.

The sample will be composed 20 college students. Participants will be gathered into

groups of 4 based on the results of the Pre-Session Questionnaire. The questionnaire will

measure the participants’ experience levels with various forms of virtual worlds. The groups

will be structured to equalize the distribution of experience with virtual worlds such that no

one group is composed of individuals with the most experience with virtual worlds.

Study design.

The study utilizes a within-subjects test design of 5 groups of 4 participants each

across 4 types of Entertainment Media Products – that is, four different media technologies

that can be utilized for entertainment purposes, and have had media products created for

them to utilize their capability. The unit of analysis for all measurements is individual-in-

situation; thus there will be 20 situations for each Entertainment Media Product in which to

compare how people made sense of engaging with the technology.

The following EMPs are all modalities for delivering virtual content intended to be

entertaining, but they differ in: (a) if they can be experienced with others Face-to-

Face/Computer-Mediated; (b) if they are intended as being entertaining as a Game or Non-

Game; and, (c) if they require the user to Physically Interact with the technology to receive

the content.

Motion Picture – a non-gaming situation that involves people meeting face-to-face and engaging with a virtual non-interactive content (diegesis of film).

Video Game Console – a gaming situation that involves people interacting face-to-face and engaging with virtual interactive content (controllers, avatars, etc).

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game – a gaming situation that involves people interacting via computer-mediated and playing with virtual interactive content (keyboard, avatars, Skype, etc).

Multi-User Virtual Environment – a non-gaming situation that involves people interacting via computer-mediated and engaging with virtual interactive content (keyboard, avatars, Skype, etc).

To control the content as much as possible, all Entertainment Media Products will have their

content based on a specific genre, with the conventions of that genre consistent across all

media products. In this case, the genre of superhero has been chosen for two reasons:

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technical restrictions for the Video Game Console selection; and, a recent surge in popularity

for the superhero genre due to the success of superhero movie franchises around the world.

Movie to watch: Fantastic Four or X-Men. Both movies focus on a group of

superheroes who band together to stop the supervillain. The movie selected will

depend upon answers in the Pre-Session Questionnaire, detailed below.

Wii Game to play: Marvel Ultimate Alliance. The game focuses on a group of

superheroes who band together to stop the supervillains. Game play begins with a

brief tutorial for control, followed by the storyline that has all four players together.

MMORPG Game to play: City of Heroes. The game starts with players working

alone, but via Skype and inworld texting the group members can act together to form

teams to stop villains and supervillains.

MUVE to visit: Second Life. In specially designed island, Metrotopia, the group

members will design avatars to have superhero costumes and engage in activities to

mimic superhero abilities. At any time, after designing their superhero costumes, the

players will be allowed to travel into Second Life.

Data Corpus.

Prior to the initiation of the sessions, prospective participants will complete a Pre-

Session Questionnaire. The questions are designed to elicit basic demographics and media

experience levels for the creation of the groups. This survey will be administered online via

SurveyXact.com.

During each session, participants will be videotaped to record their reactions to the

content as well as their interactions with one another. These videotapes can be used for

analysis, as well as showing to the participants before the interviews to help reconstruct their

experiences. Also, for the MMORPG and the MUVE sessions, the avatars created by the

participants will be recorded for future analysis.

After each session, participants will fill out a Post-Session Questionnaire to measure

their predilection to engage with the media product: would they engage with it again; would

they engage with something similar to it; and why/why not to each answer.

After all sessions are completed, participants will be interviewed using SMM Micro-

Moment interviews, asking them to a) reconstruct each experience and b) compare across

the experiences.

Procedure

Participants will be scheduled to meet with their groups for 4 sessions, scheduled

dependent upon the availability of the participants. Only the 1st EMP session, watching the

movie, will not be videotaped. For both the 1st and 2nd EMP, playing the Nintendo Wii game,

sessions, groups will meet in the same room. For the 3rd and 4th EMP sessions, playing in

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the online virtual worlds, participants will be set up in four separated rooms, each with their

own camera, and allowed to communicate via Skype. After each session they will complete

one section of the Post-Session Questionnaire packet. Each session’s time commitment

breaks down as 2 hours for session and survey; the total expected time to complete the

sessions is 8 hours.

After the final session, time will be taken to schedule the interviews. Interviews will

be set up to be conducted either in person or over the phone (via Skype to record the call).

If required to fit the scheduling of the participants, interviews can be broken up by MEV

session or conducted via an IM program. Interviews are expected to last from 1-2 hours.

Combined with the time commitment for the sessions, total time commitment for the study is

expected to range from 9-10 hours.

References

Bell, M. W. (2008). Toward a definition of “virtual worlds”. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1(1), p. 2-5.

Davin, S. (2003). Healthy viewing: the reception of medical narratives. Sociology of Health & Illness, 25(6), p. 662-679.

Dervin, B. & Song, M. (2005). Reaching for phenomenological depths in uses and gratifications research: A quantitative empirical investigation. Presented at the 2005 International Communication Association, New York, NY.

Lin, A. C. (1998). Bridging positivist and interpretivist approaches to qualitative methods. Policy Studies Journal, 26(1), p. 162-180.

Napoli, P. M. (2008). “Toward a model of audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences.” Paper presented at the 2008 International Association for Media and Communication Research Digital Divides Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, July.

Reinhard, C. D. (2008). Gendered media engagings as user agency mediations with sociocultural and media structures: A Sense-Making Methodology study of the situationality of gender divergences and convergences. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008.

Reinhard, C. D. & Dervin, B. (2007). Situational and gender comparisons of digital game players' preferences for game features and gratifications. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco, May.

Schroeder, R. (2008). Defining virtual worlds and virtual environments. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 1(1), p. 6-7.

sense-making in virtual worlds -- a study design

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