The second project, a qualitative study of cognition and learning in MMOs (Steinkuehler, 2005), consisted of a two-year ethnography of the MMO Lineage (first I, then II) conducted from a sociocultural perspective (Gee, 1999; Lave & Wenger, 1991)The goal of this project was to explicate the kinds of social and intellectual activities in which gamers routinely participate, including individual and collaborative problem solving, identity construction, apprenticeship, and literacy practicesCognitive ethnography (Hutchins, 1995) was chosen as the primary research methodology as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place (Steinkuehler, Black, & Clinton, 2005)

This "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) included 24 months of participant observation in the game (eight months averaging eight to 12 hours of gameplay daily, the remaining months averaging 20-40 hours per week); several thousand lines of recorded and transcribed observations of naturally occurring game play (digital screenshot images, video recordings, and fieldnotes); and collections of game-related player communications with informants including posts to official (NCSoft sponsored) and unofficial discussion boards (on guild and fan websites), chatroom transcripts, instant message conversations, and emailsAlso considered were community documents from the Lineage fandom network (i.e., materials either linked directly to the corporate sponsored website or within the set of game-related sites that contained more internal links among them than external links beyond them; Barabsi, 2003) including guild and fan websites, fan fictions, and community-written player manuals and guidebooks

As part of the second project, repeated unstructured and semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1986) of 16 key informants throughout the course of the investigation, with interviews lasting one hour on average, resulting in roughly 100 hours of recorded dialogue (either IM transcript or audio recording)Additional interviews were not recorded but used as a basis for fieldnotes, fact checking, triangulation of data, and verification of major themesThe data were organized using NUD*IST and NVivo qualitative data analysis software to identify major themes (e.g., learning through apprenticeship), and were coded inductively in the second year of the study in order to identify major patterns within those themes (e.g., scaffolding strategies)Discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) was used throughout the investigation as the fundamental basis for analysis in order to tease out how the underlying assumptions or "cultural models" (Holland & Quinn, 1987) participants held about the virtual social and material world were created, maintained, and transformed by specific individuals and social groups whose ways of being in the world underwrite them

In combination, these two empirical studies provide a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)The two franchises investigated, Lineage I and II and Asheron's Call I and II, represent a fairly mainstream portion of the fantasy-based MMO market: All four titles involved players assuming the roles of archetypal medieval fighter types, social architectures which reward players for cooperation and the formation of long-term player groups or "guilds." The Lineage series is a highly successful franchise in South Korea, with moderate U.Ssuccess; the Asheron's Call series was moderately successful in the U.S., but not abroadThe combined data corpus provided a range of in-game contexts for observation while exhibiting consistency in design features across all four