Field Research in Virtual Worlds (Second Life)

The Paper

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Here is a link to the paper we completed.

For complete course info, visit this link.

Data

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I found that I had 13 days of raw footage in folders. Most times, I spent about an hour in the field. From that, I rendered my data with individual notes and into over 130 notecards.

The notecards were then categorized into folders - such as acceptance, praise or blame, duties for all ranks, and so on. This helped me later when comparing my notes with the other researcher.

Limitations

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We had several limitations to our study, but most imporant was time, both for us as researchers and for them as a group. Often times, their meetings or events would be canceled, or one of us would have to miss something for other reasons. For instance, because of my job, I had to miss all of the staff meetings.

The semester, in general, wasn't enough time. This is ideally a two-year commitment.

Concepts

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The entire goal for the class to discover how a group produces community in virtual worlds.

Community was achieved through teamwork and coordinated behavioral action.

Both sub-concepts could be applied to dancing, chores, and ozashiki, as both had aspects of each in them.

Our Findings

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One of the aspects we really studied was dance. So we were supposed to find out how to do it, how many people usually take part, how praise or blame is given for doing well or doing not so well, and more.

The dance showed that teamwork was very important. The dancers counted in sync with each other for their avatars to dance in sync. This could only be accomplished as a team.

Chores were another aspect we chose to look at. Mostly, chores were done individually, but we found that since instituting the chores in March 2009, the ladies of the okiya seemed to have tighter knit relationships.

Chores included doing things like scrubbing floors, sewing dresses, and preparing dinner.

The final aspect we looked at was ozashiki, which were relaxing gatherings at a teahouse where minarai told stories.

Shikomi would serve as something like hostesses, seating guests to their seats before the event started, and showing them the way out after it was over. Minarai ranks or higher would tell the stories and serve refreshments, providing the main entertainment for the night.

Explanation of what we did

2009-05-06T22:09:00.006-05:00

For the spring semester, I participated in Multimedia 444: Field Research in Virtual Worlds.

I traded in Chikara Yokosuka for Warai Omizu, my female alter ego inside of Second Life.

We studied a community of practice inside of Second Life – how a group inside a virtual world can supports community. After mulling over a few options, we decided to study geisha culture. One other researcher and I have an affinity for Japanese culture, so it made sense.

We spent some time doing participant observation – training as shikomi, which are the lowest rank in the geisha chain. I dropped out to do more observational research, while the other stayed in and was actually promoted to minarai, the next rank.

Most of what we did was take notes. Notes, notes, notes. After we took notes, we rendered them into categories. The goal was to fill up a category of all kinds of different instances of something happening so we could help explain what this group was doing.

I attended roughly 10 events, spending about the same number of hours in the field, but likely more. I spent more time rendering notes than I did in the field, for sure.

We also conducted interviews with members. I had an informant that I conducted formal interviews with, where I had crafted questions beforehand looking to gain certain information. I have data from about a dozen interviews.

The rest of what we did was observed – watched how other avatars interact with each other, where, for how long, and so on. The difficult part was finding data where we didn't have an effect on it.

Two books that guided us were Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff and The Discovery of Grounded Theory by Anselm L. Straus and Barney Glaser.

CITI Certificate - Assignment 1

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Click on this image for the CITI completion certificate.

Setup

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Making sure this is set up correctly.