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ICTs in the Contemporary World seminar
Making Work More Like Play
Professor Bonnie Nardi
Department of Informatics, University of California at Irvine
Tuesday 3 July, 2007 3.00 - 5.00 p.m.
Fifth Floor, Tower One
Managers and educators have noticed the spontaneous ways in which players of massively multiplayer online games create and manage knowledge online, train and support one another, reflexively interject their play experience into the game through software modifications, and self-organize entirely in virtual space. Can these practices be brought to business and education to improve distributed work? According to play theorists such as Caillois, Sutton-Smith, and Turner, play (1) makes people feel good in some way, (2) is voluntary, (3) takes place in a space separate from the stresses of real life, and (4) involves known, repeated, ritualistic activities. Since most business and educational environments do not share the characteristics of play, how can the desirable behaviours associated with gaming environments propagate to work and school settings? To address this question of how the boundaries between technologies of work and technologies of play might be overcome, I will discuss empirical research on communicative practices in World of Warcraft, a successful
multiplayer game with eight million players worldwide.
Bonnie Nardi is professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Informatics, School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. Professor Nardi is known for her use and extension of Activity Theory in the study of information systems and computer based devices. She has published prolifically in academic journals and is the author of many books including Context and Consciousness (1997) and Acting with Technology (2006, together with Victor Kaptelinin) both published by MIT Press
Please note places will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis - registration is not required. For any further queries regarding this seminar or to request information about future events please contact Frances White, Research Coordinator
Page last updated 05 February 2009 ^
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