Horde speaking to Alliance, so to speak

There was a pretty fascinating thread over at Terra Nova this past weekend, centered around a question that I'm sure is ageold in the world of educational research - that is, how do you make research meaningful to practicioners? In this case, the discussion was around the fact that there's all the increasing interest in gaming as an entertainment and learning space, but the game designers look and listen to the researchers, and all they hear is "Yad ho grab fo tu pwe".

Here's the conclusion to the post:

I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time. An optimistic disposition -- a faith, even -- in technology and code-based problem solving runs deep in the technology and software development community (see, for example, Gary Lee Downey's ethnography of CAD/CAM engineering, The Machine in Me), and it hampers developers' ability to recognize the range of content and community creation (very broadly defined) by users as well as the fruits of the well-established but different methodologies and concepts of researchers.

And here, in part, was the return salvo:

In that sense, I understand exactly where Eric and Raph are coming from; for the most part, academia *is* irrelevant to commercial MMOs. Hell, we'd love it if you guys would study something that might actually have a benefit to the industry, such as Nick Yee's work or that of Julian Dibbel; much of what passes for research in this field is nothing more than trying to count how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The data might be trivially interesting, but who really cares?

Hoo, boy. Needless to say, 64 comments later, this thread gives a very complete picture of the challenges we're facing. The designer perspective seemed to coalesce around "do research that answers questions I have in way that I understand," while the researcher perspective seemed to be "basic research and access to data leads to new questions that practitioners don't have the attention or inspiration to pursue."

I guess this caused me to think about how we, or researchers in general, will have to refine our requests for access when we're dealing with folks who have a very ROI-driven accounting for their time and thinking. A request I'd love to make, for instance, is an API to access Blizzard's forums, so that I could pull their contents into a relational database for future study. From my perspective, it's a simple enough request, and probably a simple technical problem for them, too. But the question is, why would it make sense for them to do it? What would a day or two of a developer's time cost - $2,000? $3,000? That seems like a small enough cost, but without a clear return, and with the knowledge that there are probably 50 or 60 researchers with similar $3,000 requests, I can see that Blizzard would need something more economically compelling.

So, I dunno. I'm still grappling with the formulation of a research question coming out of our foray into a virtual world, and truthfully, I'm struggling to see how my questions would be different from some that Nick Yee has posed on the Daedalus Project in one way or another. How many different ethnographic surveys do we need? I feel like I'm arguing that "all the good questions have been taken," which surely isn't true, but watching the Terra Nova discussion certainly added another question, one of relevance, and relevance to whom.