Space and Wayfinding: Or, I walk into fences, curtains, and bushes a lot

Besides spending most of my early game play not knowing exactly how to operate the controls in the game (I am still resisting using W & S and instead have been using the Up and Down arrows, which I'm sure is not the "right" thing to be doing in the long run, and just yesterday, after about 10 - 12 collective hours of game play I took some time to figure out how to jump), a kinesthetic factor, my "spacial" sense, or "spacial phase of micro involvement" (Calleja, 2007) has dominated much of my attention.

Upon entering the game with Luxindra, I spent about 5 minutes (a long time) in the clump shown in the image above moving my cursor around the screen and reading the manual on how to move my character in the most basic ways. I then proceeded to spend about 20 - 30 minutes (an eternity) lost in a castle while other players in the game ran around with seeming purpose. Much of this, because of my unfamiliarity with the 3-D simulated environment and the way to navigate through it, involved viewing my lost situation through shrouds of curtains (the second image) or through the bodies of other players or characters. I didn't know how to get a "quest" or find whom the other players were talking to, but I kept hearing on my headphones "Reporting for duty" or "Go with honor" as (I later realized) other players received their instructions from an AI character, known as an FPC, a shorthand so "obvious" that WoWWiki does not have an entry on it.

A side note on game supports and brief forays into social interaction: If you look at the two images I have sampled here, both have yellow exclamation points at the bottom, which, if rolled over, give information, often related to the frustration at hand. Other features, such as information boxes that come up on objects, also still help me.


There does seem to be some slight responsiveness of the help structures in the game to increases in ineptitude, but I could just be reading too much into their random reinforcement. At one point I learned how to enter text into the chat box scrolling at the bottom left of the screen. Three out of the four times that I asked a question on how to do something or where to go for something, it was not answered (and I still have not figured out where the people are that are chatting in this box), but there are probably better strategies. A couple of players "winked" at me, one challenged me to a duel (I declined), and two asked me to join a group. I awkwardly figured out how to type in that I was a "newbi" and therefore wanted to practice more. The group work thing is going to be a hurdle in this virtual world just as it is for me in the real one.


The long periods of disorientation and wandering in circles really got me into some reflection on how much I was having to relearn a new type of wayfinding in this virtual world. Having not played many video games in recent years, and certainly not with 3D visualization, the environment was difficult to navigate both cognitively and with my limited mouse and keyboard skills. In life, my wayfinding has been significant affected by a poor sense of direction, but I actually think I have developed a learned better sense of space and direction from traveling, a love of maps, driving, and the conscious investigation of various strategies. I was interested in how these same strategies might play out in learning a new spacial sense and sense of direction in what was clearly a new environment. So far these tactics have been most effective:

• Increased strategic use of the game's mapping supports: symbols for "you are here" and for key locations


• Deliberate tracking of landmarks, distinct geographical and physical features (*a strategy impaired in the smooth, repetitious virtual world)


• Marking of approximate time to cover distances, move between spots


• Experimentation with direction; exploring new areas before venturing on a "task" or specific activity

I'm also interested in the literature and talk out there on 3D virtual environments and how we learn about them and with them:

• Here is a good background piece on wayfinding and spacial representation in general: Spacial Orientation, Wayfinding, and Representation (Darken & Peterson)


• Aram Bartholl, a German artist, explores making the digital game world physical in his art. The photo to the left is from his piece WOW! and he has done other similar pieces, such as this, of what it would be like to get coffee in the "real" WoW "world."
  
  




• An interesting article on strategies for "Wayfinding Design: Hidden Barriers to Universal Access"


• Of course I'm interested not only in mapping the virtual environment in World of Warcraft, but how applications like GoogleMaps and others are changing our representations of space. Earthmine, Inc is exploring how these representations may link to our sources of information.


• Fred Cavazza, on his blog, has created an interesting visual chart, or a Virtual Worlds Comparison Chart, a typology of the fields employing mapping technology.


• Georgia Leigh McGregor, at the University of New South Wales, has some scholarship on the specific spacial environments of MMORPGs:


• Architecture, Space and Gameplay in World of Warcraft and Battle for Middle Earth 2


• Situations of Play: Patterns of Spatial Use in Videogames