Modeling play: re-casting expertise in MMOGs

With the increasing popularity of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Maple Story, attempts have been made to define and measure player expertise both within and across online games. Apart from nuanced ethnographic accounts of elite players, which are deliberately localized and small-scale, studies of MMOG expertise to date have either deployed one-dimensional variables such time spent playing and in-game titles and accomplishments, or a combination of the these. These approaches risk obscuring a host of complex considerations, such as players' prior experience with the game or genre, their relationships to other players, and the ludic affordances and limitations of specific games. And they are also significantly less sophisticated than the criteria and tools players themselves use to measure expertise. Our study of expertise in online games is guided by Bruno Latour's injunction to "follow the actors"---which for us in this case meant paying careful attention to how players themselves characterize and pursue 'expertise' in the everyday realities of their everyday/everynight MMOG lives. Drawing from a multisite, mixed-methods study of 250 MMOG players in 8 sites (both university laboratory and public LAN events), this paper proposes a model for identifying and assessing expertise that is better able to take into consideration the multiple forms, components and expressions of 'expert' game playing that players themselves are guided by. This model divides expertise into four inter-related modalities, each addressing a different set of competencies: investment, skill, discourse, and game knowledge. Reviewing each modality in turn, the paper frames this model as an attempt to preserve the complexity of qualitatively-driven, ethnographic accounts of expertise, mobilized in a quantifiable and measurable way.