This document discusses the potential for online games and virtual worlds to foster global cooperation and development. It argues that these spaces encourage interaction, collaboration, and civic engagement. They can help connect disconnected individuals and possibly alleviate poverty in developing areas through low-tech mobile games. Overall, online communities represent new modes of interaction that meet basic human needs and can serve as a model for a more collaborative society.

1. Conclusion
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve
them.
- Isaac Asimov
In February 2008, I attended the Summit for Triple Helix Innovation in Hawaii, a
discussion among academics, scientists and government officials aimed at improving
collaboration between these sectors in the name of fostering inter-disciplinary
innovation. I did a talk on collaboration in virtual worlds that was very well-received,
but what I was really struck by (aside from how amazing spiders are) were the
considerations of ‘the other five billion’; the vast majority of people on this planet who
as yet have no access to the networked world so many of us take for granted. I view this
time of transition as an opportunity to learn as much as possible about what is good
about extant digital spaces, and to use those data to engineer spaces that foster even
broader cooperation amongst previously disconnected individuals. When I read through
the reams of data I have collected throughout this study, the thing that strikes me most
is the collective passion with which everyone expresses their feelings about these new
interactive media and the impacts on individual lives. Games, in particular, have piqued
our interest, for they represent entirely new modes of interaction that service some
very basic needs. What we have not perhaps considered is how we can invite the rest of
the world’s members to join these play spaces: certainly low-fi cell phone based games
are a possibility in some developing areas, and combined with economic incentives,
could be a mechanism for pulling some individuals out of poverty. What is clear to me is
that there are myriad possibilities for building out global play spaces that encourage
interaction, collaboration and co-creation, and yes, economic development.

2. I began this thesis with a quote about vision. Throughout history the best futurists have
been those who have been able to marry a keen understanding of the present with a
fascination for how our present might converge into future. Sometimes this forward-
looking proclivity comes from an internal optimism whilst others fret about the future,
especially regarding the ‘perils’ of technology. I fall into the former camp, obviously,
because I think I am particularly well situated to weigh the beauty of these emerging
communities against the more visibly negative minorities. Despite popular notions
about digital games, in my mind they represent many things that are good about our
changing world:
Games are a productive context for research not only in terms of what they reveal
about cognition (such as problem solving and its meaning) and the characteristics
and features of successful and sustainable online communities, but also in terms of
what they can tell us (as both culture and cultural artifact) about life in a world that
is increasingly globalized and networked (Steinkuehler, 2005b, p. 8)
Media scholars frequently worry about the power of media and its perpetrators to
affect the docile and disenfranchised. What I have tried to demonstrate in this thesis,
however, is that recent movements in media demonstrate a desire to be involved, and
reflect a power that has toppled many a media hegemony even in recent months, just in
the past two years (a number of traditional media and economic vehicles are also
disappearing, denoting a period of transition 1). But beyond that, they demonstrate
what can happen to people and their expectations of how their involvement might play
out in worlds both virtual and physical. As I write this conclusion in the early 2009, the
United States have just experienced a presidential race of historic proportions whose
success many pundits attribute to the Internet and increasing connectedness between
previously disenfranchised individuals 2. Similarly, many young people in the 1980s and
1990s were enormously disaffected by politics and apathy among Gen X and Y had been
1
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090227/ap_on_bi_ge/rocky_mountain_news_closes
2
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html

3. pervasive. Yet something is clearly happening. A relatively inexperienced black U.S.
senator hired a former Facebook employee and made tens of million dollars online via
$15 donations given by individuals who had previously eschewed political participation
3
. Strangely this all came as a surprise to older generations, and observers world-wide,
though the youthful tsunami that fueled President Obama’s campaign worked quietly
and tirelessly till November 4th, 2008 when Obama’s landslide victory thrilled a nation
that had lost hope and a sense of possibility. The country was shocked. As recently as
2004, groups like the Center for Social Media bemoaned the disconnection of youth
from the public domain, calling it a ‘participation gap’:
Over a 25-year span, the national rate of voter participation experienced a 9
percent drop among all age groups, but double that - an 18 percent decrease. for
voters ages 18-24 (Montgomery, Gottlieg-Robles, & Larson, 2004, p. 7)
However, within this set of issues, they foresaw a potential solution: that the Internet
might play a huge role in encouraging young people to be more engaged civically. And
that’s exactly what happened during this election, and continues to be leveraged in
Obama’s subsequent service campaign. The opportunity was ripe. What they may not
have expected is that participation, while measured in terms of specific political activity,
is often prepared for via participation in other, less serious activities. Yes, even the much
vilified gaming. Each small effort to participate, when reinforced with an appropriate
response, encourages the participant to engage further, and more deeply. Even
something as seemingly frivolous as organizing a naked race in a virtual world can serve
to impart an important visceral message that one has the power to create change, that
one’s personal agency is incontrovertible. Sending in a news story to CNN via email and
seeing it broadcasted with credit given to the citizen iReporter 4 with their cell phone
camera is a powerful mechanism that puts power back in the hands of the media
3
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance
4
http://www.ireport.com/

4. consumer, now media producer as well. Developing this sense of agency in the world
goes a long way towards combating the apathy that had become all too pervasive.
In the coming months and years I would like to continue to develop a model around
productive play, perhaps by mapping a segmentation onto those proclivities that will
help to predict how players are likely to engage, and to what degree they are aware of
subtle achievements, learning and transformations that might be gained. Increasing
self-awareness through reflection (Boud 1985; Marsick 1992) accompanying play might
be an important part of the equation moving forward. Certainly promoting teacher and
parental awareness is critical, so some of this reflection (how do you feel about mowing
down those pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto, Johnny?) should occur naturally. I am
completely convinced that the opportunities to marry digital play spaces with existing
knowledge bases is huge and will represent a profound shift in the way we learn and
internalize that learning. Cognition is not data in/data out, but rather a holistic set of
processes that play experiences are particularly well suited to (Hawkins 2004, 2005,
Pinker 2005 a, 2005b, et al).
Beyond thinking about games for learning and personal and collective transformation, I
am interested in how play, game cultures, and indeed the mechanics of gaming have
changed the way we approach the world. If we were to extend the culture of an
average server on City of Heroes to the physical world, would it represent a microcosm
of some larger, perhaps prescribed, reality, or something different entirely? Could it be
considered a blueprint for a beneficial and collaborative society? Recent research into
the role of play in our lives suggests that play might be less of a literal preparation for
life, and more of a mechanism for the development of overall brain flexibility, as well as
more holistic capabilities (Henig, 2008). As Pat Kane suggests (2005), a more playful
society could well be the key to solving many of the world’s problems. It seems slightly
ridiculous, for instance, that we even fight physical wars anymore, when there are
mechanisms to challenge one another without hurting real people (penalties could be
economic?).

5. Like Plato and Dewey, my concern with learning is that it is the way in which we evolve
as individuals, and how this evolution can potentially lead to improvements in our
human ecosystem, including our various institutions like work and school. As George
Siemens comments (2004), considering a better model for school, for instance, might
benefit from studies such as this, where we can look at how people from youth to the
elderly learn in digital spaces. We know that survival in our crowded, inter-dependent
world is based on our ability to adapt to our socio-cultural contexts: to collaborate,
cooperate, reduce waste, find efficiency, and generally work together more effectively.
As economist Edward Castronova says in the conclusion to his book, Exodus to the
Virtual World, our forays into digital spaces may well represent a model for a new
society based on such values:
The coming exodus into virtual worlds will force us to change. The society that
emerges in the real world will have to become more fun than the society we have
now. Because games and virtual worlds have learned how to help people learn and
work and socialize while having fun, the new society will probably be better
educated, more productive, and more civically engaged. I hope we will parent as
well or better. Our task is to prepare for the revolution by further developing the
new science of fun policy, seeing what we can accomplish with the tools that virtual
world designers have created. Doing so, we will improve our understanding of the
world to come. More important, though, we may well discover some new, exciting,
and beneficial things about how our society works, and how it can make every one
of us happier (Castronova, 2007, p. 208)
As outlined in Chapter 4, this study centered around a handful of core research
questions. I believe these questions have been more than adequately addressed, and
there is also a significant body of data that allows them to be explored even more
thoroughly in the future:
0How players self-organise into temporary and more permanent groupings and
assist each other in learning the intricacies of a world.

6. 1- These practices were documented, players articulated the nuances of the
experiences, and subtleties around etiquette, communication and meaning-making
were explored. The findings corresponded to expected theoretical foundations, as
outlined in Chapters 1-3.
2How players contribute to the world and meta-world environment, and how
developers/publishers respond to these contributions.
3- The meta-game, in addition to the game world itself, were explored and
documented, from the perspectives of players, developers and fan producers
4How socio-cultural literacy develops in the context of a world, and how the worlds
develop and regulate unique cultures and values.
5- Myriad examples of the foundational game and cultural elements were provided
and tied into broader theoretical memes as much as possible
6What a successful group looks like in terms of etiquette, roles and social norms.
7- Player expectations around these constructs were explored
8How skills developed in virtual worlds might be leveraged into real-life contexts.
9- Examples of both how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved were
provided
10What implications virtual worlds suggest for learning programmes in business and
educational settings.
11- Some possible ideas and examples were provided
12What, if any, are the possibilities for transfer, transformation and indeed, greater
social good?
13- Only the tip of the iceberg ‘was explored, but some examples of
‘transformational learning’ and ‘sanctuary’ were covered, and future directions
anticipated.

7. It is my sincere hope and belief w.that with guidance and reflection from parents,
teachers, and yes, our digital communities at large, positive experiences in virtual
environments will find ongoing transference to our physical environments, that we will
learn to harness the best of all worlds into one reality that encompasses both physical
and virtual dimensions. It is also imperative that media literacies (Buckingham and
Sefton-Green 1997) across analogue and digital spaces be part of any educational
curriculum. My vision for the future includes a time when we will no longer debate
whether a relationship that takes place in a virtual reality is real or not. I imagine a day
when we will not scapegoat digital games as the source of societal ills, but will instead
consistently look to thornier issues of poverty, education and nutrition for clues into
what troubles our youth (Williams 2004), and then look further to try to understand the
nature of the satisfactions and possibilities (Aarseth 2003,Salen and Zimmerman 2004)
they are finding in digital spaces. For one thing, these technologies and the spaces
surrounding them afford amazing new opportunities for transformational learning, a
possibility that has yet to be explored to any significant degree. I look forward to the
day when we can anticipate a bright future in which everyone can realize their potential,
in which everyone is given many opportunities to try on a range of identities and roles
until they find the one that suits them best. I would love for game developers to be
inspired to make some amazing games (McGonigal et al, 2008), especially ones that can
dovetail effectively with state and national curricula, and that leverage what games do
best: create sandbox environments that allow learners to experience and therefore
learn deeply, not simply memorise facts out of context. But most of all I look forward to
a world in which we really can depend again on our communities to help us learn,
support us in times of need, and fuel us through collective endeavours that help us
understand what it means to contribute and belong, and I do believe that digital games
are a way in which many kids, geeks and non-geeks alike, are developing these
capabilities. One of the primary motivators in life is being needed. Yet I would argue
that it is the thing that has been missing these last few decades as the distance between
people, their families and communities has widened, and the reason I believe people

8. have gravitated towards the Internet with such fervor as a result of losing other
mechanisms for community and participation (Putnam 1995; Steinkuehler and Williams
2006). However, I would argue these places are more than just the third places of yore:
they represent a way in which we can reconnect with our collective spirit, the absence
of which leaves us bored, depressed and feeling hopeless. Perhaps as Barack Obama
says, it is audacious to hope, but without a sense of optimism about our future, without
the ability to believe that the bad might outweigh the good, then what is the way
forward? We can vilify games, or ignore them, but what we need is more studies that
define what works and doesn’t in digital game environments, and applies those finding
to tough educational and social issues.
I hope this thesis is a start for other researchers passionate about these possibilities. In
digital spaces like Terra Nova (http://terranova.blogs.com), the conversation continues…
I posit that at the core there is no real boundary between the virtual and the real
phenomenologies. Both are publicly accessible and both contain real social
interactions, and real values, both create group histories, group/collective memories
and so on and so forth. Both allow group creation of products, values etc... Both
allow the corruption of everything that can be created both within and out of the
virtual. So your statement paraded as a question (rhetorical?): 'are we that opaque
mass that happily accepts meaningless substitutes for meaning' There is as much
'meaning' in the virtual as in the 'real'. Note that the distinction real and virtual is
purely technological: i.e. what sustains the phenomena. Whichever way you look at
it, even if reality is deconstructed, as has been done not only by the recent post
modern left bank western philosophers, and by a whole series of really ancient Asian
philosophies e.g. advaita vedantism, buddhism, non-dualism etc... reality and
virtuality are indeed on the same plane...no difference, both functionally and
epistemologically. I have always been very surprised at the endless posts about 'hey

9. what are you doing in the virtual world? Get a real life' I am still thinking why some
people find 'reality' more meaningful than 'virtuality' (Ramesh Raloll 5)
Even more importantly, the future is bright as our physical and virtual worlds become
more and more connected, with more and more participants, and a deeper, native
understanding of what these worlds are about, and the opportunities they afford. I do
think it is mandatory that parents and educators and pundits invest a bit of time in
actually experiencing the environments I’ve described in this document. What they will
find is a frontier ripe with possibility, full of players whose emotional investments in
these spaces are surprisingly profound. We can’t underestimate the power of these
experiences; further research clearly needs to be done, but I hope this thesis is a useful
snapshot of a culture in time, and might provide inspiration to other scholars interested
in these arenas.
Learning theories are concerned with the actual process of learning, not with the
value of what is being learned. In a networked world, the very manner of
information that we acquire is worth exploring. The need to evaluate the
worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself
begins. When knowledge is subject to paucity, the process of assessing worthiness
is assumed to be intrinsic to learning. When knowledge is abundant, the rapid
evaluation of knowledge is important. Additional concerns arise from the rapid
increase in information. In today’s environment, action is often needed without
personal learning – that is, we need to act by drawing information outside of our
primary knowledge. The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and
patterns is a valuable skill (Siemens 2006).
What stories do you have to tell? How can you help connect the dots to other formal
efforts to produce happy, well-adjusted citizens? There is much work to be done with
these gifts we have cleverly unearthed, these incredible technological tools we have
that can create better, brighter worlds based on values encompassing collaboration,
5
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/03/libert_galit_fr.html

10. cooperation, humor, tolerance, and yes, love. Our talents are profound; it is only faith
and vision that we lack. Let’s do what we can to believe.
Having begun with a quote, I will also end with a couple. Thank you for reading.
“Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.”
-Joseph Chilton
“Play fair. Don't hit people. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.”
-Robert Fulghum