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Multi-Modal Investigations of Relationship Play in Virtual Worlds

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40 International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010

Multi-Modal investigations
of relationship Play
in Virtual Worlds
Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Deborah Fields, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Kristin A. Searle, University of Pennsylvania, USA

abstraCt
Millions of youth have joined virtual worlds to hang out with each other. However, capturing their interac-
tions is no easy feat given the complexity of virtual worlds, their 24/7 availability, and distributed access from
different places. In this article, we illustrate what different methods can reveal about the dating and flirting
practices of tweens in Whyville.net, a virtual world with over 1.5 million registered players in 2005 between
the ages 8-16 years old. We compare findings from analyses of tweens’ newspaper writings, chat records, and
logfile data. Our analysis demonstrates the mixed attitudes toward flirting on Whyville and the pervasive-
ness of flirting as a whole, as well as the breadth and selectivity of tweens’ adoption of flirting practices. We
discuss how our multi-modal investigation reveals individual variation and development across practices and
suggests that player expertise might contribute to the striking contrast between formal writing about dat-
ing and the frequency of it on the site. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our methodological approaches
and suggest that our findings are limited to a particular space and time in the existence of Whyville and the
tweens who populate it.

Keywords: Adolescents, Adolescents Behavior in Virtual Worlds, Online Dating, Tweens, Virtual Worlds,
Whyville

introDuCtion relationships (Buckingham & Wilett, 2006;

To date, most studies of virtual social spaces
have focused on college youth and adults while
largely ignoring younger players. Yet teens
have rapidly adopted social networking sites
like MySpace and Friendster as their own for
continuing friendships and developing casual
DOI: 10.4018/jgcms.2010010104
Mazarella, 2005). Further, many online spaces
have opened up for even younger players than in
the previous decade. Toontown, Club Penguin,
Neopets—to name but a few—are aimed at
younger players, called tweens, and millions
of them have joined these places to hang out
with each other. Researcher Danah Boyd (2008)
suggests that one attraction of these sites is that
they “provid[e] teens with a space to work out

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is prohibited.
International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010 41
identity and status, make sense of cultural cues,
and negotiate public life” (p. 120). As tweens
move from childhood into adolescence they try
out various ways to begin relationships that they
anticipate engaging in. While such relationship-
play is an important steppingstone in tweens’
social development (Thorne, 1993) it often takes
place outside adult-supervised spaces and might
explain the increasing prominence of virtual
worlds. Studying such social interactions in
virtual worlds is difficult given the complexity
of virtual environments, their 24/7 availability,
and distributed access from different places.
The study of tween flirting and dating in virtual
worlds so far has received little attention and
will be the focus of this article.
In this article, we want to illustrate what
different methods can reveal about a particular
set of social practices, namely dating and flirt-
ing, of tweens in Whyville.net, a virtual world
with over 1.5 million registered players in 2005
between the ages 8-16 years old. In Whyville,
citizens play casual science games in order to
earn a virtual salary (in ‘clams’), which they
can then spend on buying and designing parts
for their avatars (virtual characters), projectiles
to throw at other users, and other goods. The
general consensus among Whyvillians (the
citizens of the virtual community of Whyville)
is that earning a good salary and thus procuring
a large number of clams to spend on face parts
or other goods is essential for the primary desire
of Whyvillians, developing relationships (Kafai
& Giang, 2007). From our previous research
on Whyville, we know that tweens spend most
of their time in virtual worlds socializing with
one another and engaged in identity play with
their avatars as a vehicle for these explorations
(Feldon & Kafai, 2008; Fields & Kafai, in press).
Beyond these central activities, players develop
niches depending on their interests and levels
of expertise. Often girls and boys play in same-
sex groupings, but sometimes come together,
as evidenced in the diffusion of teleporting and
projectile throwing practices through the after
school gaming club (Fields & Kafai, 2009;
Fields & Kafai, 2008; Kafai, 2008). Our studies
of these practices were very focused, looking
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is prohibited.
closely at how club members learned from each
other how to teleport and how to throw projec-
tiles. To do this we searched logfiles selectively
and drew on observations from the club to put
together a larger picture of the diffusion of these
practices (Kafai & Fields, in press).
Capturing flirting and dating proved to
be difficult because the practices were more
complicated, not being limited to particular
commands but being much more dependent
on context. Additionally, field observations in
the after-school gaming club provided limited
evidence that boys flirted in Whyville yet we
had hints from the logfiles that the girls flirted
without advertising it in the club (Kafai, 2008;
Fields & Kafai, 2008). These initial observa-
tions suggested discrepancies between online
and offline activity in regard to flirting. In the
following sections, we describe our efforts
to engage other methods that captured what
tweens did and how they talked about flirting
and dating, starting with a content analysis of
the newspaper writings about flirting and dat-
ing in The Whyville Times, the weekly online
newspaper, followed by a word frequency search
of chat records. Only by analyzing logfiles to
develop case studies that provided detailed
context of flirting, were we able to capture
the richness and nuances in flirting and dating
that were not visible or documented in other
data sources.
baCkGrounD
Researchers of virtual worlds have employed
various methods to understand dimensions of
social activity: extensive ethnographies to cap-
ture detail and richness of interactions over time
(e.g., Boellstorff, 2008; Taylor, 2006), surveys
to capture the range of interests and experi-
ences of the massive number of participating
players (Williams, Yee & Caplan, 2008), field
observations to capture play in the virtual and
the real as integrated aspects of play in virtual
communities (Castronova, 2005; Jenkins, 2006;
Kafai, 2008; Leander & Lovvorn, 2006), logfiles
for revealing trends and patterns (Bruckman,
42 International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010
2006; Williams, Consalvo Caplan, & Yee,
in press), and content analyses of discussion
boards to capture players’ thoughts and strategy
formation about the virtual world (Steinkuehler
& Duncan, 2008).
While each of these methods reveals valid
aspects of online life, tracking data in the form
of logfiles and chat can provide a promising
avenue to capture the private nature of relation-
ship play that might often take place outside
public view. Traditionally, researchers have
conducted extensive quantitative analysis of
logfiles to capture patterns over a large num-
ber of people over a long period of time (e.g.,
Williams et al., 2008), analyze social networks
(Duchenaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2006) or
combine multiple data sources (Feldon & Kafai,
2008). While these quantitative approaches re-
veal trends and patterns, they might also leave
aside some of the more subtle cues employed
in social interactions. Some researchers have
used logfiles qualitatively over a short period
of time, for instance two girls over a few days
(Bruckman, 2000), a small group during a few
class periods (Clarke & Dede, 2007), or local
chat interactions (Nardi, Ly, & Harris, 2007).
Here we propose a narrative approach
that rebuilds the online life of participants by
condensing data points into comprehensive
accounts. We contend that this approach can
reveal particular social practices across online
and offline spaces and aspects of individual
players’ participation not captured otherwise
and hence well suited for our focus on antici-
patory flirting and dating. We thus applied a
new method to analyze logfile data, called
qualitative logfile analysis (Kafai & Fields, in
press). We then combined the insights gained
from qualitative logfile analysis with other data
sources to create a fuller picture of anticipatory
flirting and dating.
Context, MethoDs,
anD PartiCiPants
The data for our study come from three primary
sources: (1) articles from the archives of the
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is prohibited.
weekly Whyville newspaper, The Whyville
Times; and (2) chat records of 595 participants
over six months participation in Whyville from
January to June 2005; and (3) logfiles and chat
of 595 participants over six months participa-
tion in Whyville from January to June 2005.
Our analyses are supplemented by hundreds
of hours of play on Whyville ourselves over
the past several years.
online Content analysis
To illuminate players’ reflections on flirting,
we searched the archive of Whyville’s weekly,
player-written newspaper, The Whyville Times,
which contains over 9,000 articles. Using the
word “dating” as a search term, we found 129 ar-
ticles published from October 26, 2000 through
June 1, 2008. After reading the articles, we de-
termined 51 to be relevant to dating on Whyville
and further analyzed them to determine their
stance on Whydating and Whymarriage.
online Chat analysis
To substantiate the findings from the case
studies, we conducted a word frequency count
of the chat and whisper texts by all 595 par-
ticipants over six months using Mathematica
(by Wolfram). From the database of over 4.7
million lines of chat and whisper we sorted
out various terms associated with discourses
of flirting and romance identified in the case
study analysis.
online interaction analysis
To identify flirting practices amongst tweens
on Whyville, we began by choosing six tweens
from the after school club based on their partici-
pation profiles to capture a broad range of online
players. We isolated their logfiles then sampled
the days these players were on Whyville. Each
line of the logfiles contained a username, time
stamp (year-month-day-hour-minute-second),
location in Whyville, and if applicable, chat or
whisper text. Selecting their first seven days
on Whyville then alternating every five or six
days to ensure breadth of days of the week in
International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010 43
our sample, we went click by click through the
logfile data in order to create minute-by-minute
summaries of the players’ Whyville activities.
We then condensed these into short daily nar-
ratives that noted patterns and changes in par-
ticipation over time. In all we analyzed about
30 days during their six months on Whyville
from January 11 to June 5, 2005.
finDinGs
In order to highlight the affordances and limita-
tions of each aspect of our data collection and
analysis, we briefly report what we knew about
flirting and dating from our study of an after
school club where tween members played on
Whyville, then show how each aspect of our
methods provided a different angle on flirting
and dating, from the content analysis of the
online newspaper, to the chat frequency count,
to the click-by-click case studies. Our analysis
demonstrates the mixed attitudes toward flirting
on Whyville and the pervasiveness of flirting as
a whole, as well as the breadth and selectivity
of tweens’ adoption of flirting practices.
after school Club
In the after school club, boys talked loudly about
flirting with people on Whyville, generally done
by complimenting girl avatars on their looks or
giving girlfriends gifts. However we found no
evidence of girls participating in these activi-
ties from the observations that took place in the
club based on field notes, video, and interviews
(Fields & Kafai, 2008; Kafai, 2008). As we will
demonstrate later, girls did participate in flirting
on Whyville, and this difference between public
and private activity is intriguing.
Whyville times Content analysis
Many online virtual worlds have forums where
players can express their opinions publicly. In
contrast to data sources where our perspective
as researchers is central, these forums provide
a way to grasp the range in player opinion
about a given topic at a particular moment in
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is prohibited.
time and across longer expanses of time (Dib-
bell, 1998; Ludlow & Wallace, 2007; Suzuki
& Calzo, 2004). In order to better comprehend
public opinion about and understanding of
flirting and dating in Whyville we turned to
a set of 51 articles dealing with “dating” that
were published in The Whyville Times between
1999 and 2008. These articles highlighted that
tweens have a range of opinions about flirting
and dating practices in Whyville, from initial
flirtations through getting serious and even
considering Whymarriage and Whybabies.
Overall, only a few articles (12) took a pro-
dating stance. The majority (33) was against
dating in Whyville. Only six articles took a
neutral stance towards the issue. Key themes
included how to distinguish between real-life
and virtual dating practices, the importance of
avatar appearance, and how to deal with inap-
propriate behavior online. For instance, most
authors stressed that an individual’s level of
comfort with flirting and dating practices in
real life should guide his or her flirting and
dating practices in Whyville. At the same time,
some authors highlighted the potential benefits
of dating in Whyville and saw it as a relatively
low-risk space in which to try out flirting and
dating. Even XKaileeX (2003), who titled her
article “Anti-Virtual Dating,” conceded that “it
is easier to ask [someone out] online because
you’re not really there to experience it and if you
get turned down, it isn’t that embarrassing, since
not everyone knows and not everyone cares.”
These comments suggest that tweens view
virtual worlds like Whyville as a relatively safe
space for initial forays into flirting and dating but
also observe particular etiquette standards. This
also supports findings described below about
the frequency of flirtatious solicitations (such
as pick-up lines) and the relative infrequency
of dating relationships in Whyville.
Chat Content analysis
Despite most of the opinions discussed in
The Whyville Times, our chat frequency count
demonstrates the pervasiveness of flirting as a
practice on Whyville. To put the frequencies
44 International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010
in perspective, the most common word, “u,”
had a frequency of 333,603. Other common
words included “lol” (156,170), “hi” (70,819),
and “but” (54,555). Though less common
than these everyday parts of virtual text and
speech, words with romantic connotations were
common enough to demonstrate their relative
frequency, including “love/luv” (19,926), “hot/
hott/hottie/hot!” (12,522), “single” (8881), “asl”
or “a/s/l” (6914), “kiss/kisses” (5,691), “heart/
hearts” (5,431), “gf” [girlfriend] (3,793), “bf”
[boyfriend] (3597), “m/o” or “mo” [make-out]
(3448), and “sessy/sesky” (3024). The fre-
quency of these terms is comparable to words
such as “about” (19224), “friends” (5629),
and “thx” [thanks] (3390). While demonstrat-
ing that flirting terms were used quite often,
this analysis lacks the contextualized portrait
provided by our qualitative analysis of logfile
data. Without context it is difficult to say how
these terms were used.
observations of online
flirting and Dating
The six case studies we developed through a
qualitative analysis of logfile data indicate that
tweens engaged in some common practices of
flirting and dating with varying intensity during
their first six months on Whyville. There were
also some practices that were less common
amongst the case studies as well as different
styles of engaging in flirting practices. Below we
describe some of the common practices as well
as the divergences amongst the case studies.
Frequent flirting practices involved solicit-
ing relationships with the opposite sex and were
common across all of the case studies. These so-
licitations took two main forms: publicly stating
an interest in finding a dating relationship and
privately expressing interest. Both were usually
done in crowded, populated areas of Whyville
such as the Beach or Sector Y. Public, large group
solicitation usually involved asking players to
respond to a question by giving a specific three-
number response, such as “123 if ur single,” or
“555 if im hot.” Players responded to this by
saying “123” or whatever 3-digit number was
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is prohibited.
said. Another tactic was to say “a/s/l” (age/sex/
location) (see also Subramahayan et al., 2004).
Players responded by giving their age, gender,
and general area where they lived (large city,
state, or country), as in: 12/F/LA or 13/M/USA.
Often our case studies lied about their age, giv-
ing ages of 13+. Apparently being a teenager is
seen as more acceptable for dating than being
of ages 9-12. This finding was confirmed by
our content analysis of dating related articles
published in The Whyville Times. Private, in-
dividual solicitations also tended to focus on
singleness and looks. Common pick-up lines
included “r u single” or “u r hot” (or “cute”).
The chat frequency count supports this finding
based on the frequency of words like “single”
and variations of “hot.”
Less common flirting practices, for in-
stance, involved throwing a projectile such as
a heart or kiss at a desired avatar (see Fields &
Kafai, 2008). Alternatively sometimes girls or
boys offered money (clams) if someone would
become their girlfriend or boyfriend. Though
most flirting on Whyville consisted of soliciting
relationships, sometimes Whyvillians followed-
up on a solicitation beginning by replying to
the initial question about being single or saying
one’s age/sex/location (a/s/l). Then the couple
left the crowded, populated area for a more
private place – often a planetary location such
as the Moon, Mars, or Saturn. Talking about
common interests, expressing affection (“i love
u”), or even saying “i really like u” might be
said during the conversation, especially at the
end. Sometimes at the end of the conversation
one person might ask “r we bf/gf” or “r u my
bf?” to confirm the status of the relationship. If
these statements of affection were well received,
then there might be an extension to the flirtation/
relationship. Sometimes the couple will stand
next to each other—their avatars overlapping—
in a manner that is akin to cuddling or holding
hands. There is sometimes talk about “mo” or
“m/o”—making out. If they decide to kiss, this
is what it looks like—avatars so close to each
other that they overlap. Though making out is
something the couple may “do,” it is not usually
explored more than avatars standing next to each
International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010 45
other—Whyvillians do not tend to role-play.
Notably, while tweens have various strategies
for soliciting relationships in large groups and
following up on them, we did not see many
relationships last beyond a few days.
Individual variations were observed in the
six tweens we studied in how much they took
up flirting practices, though they all solicited
relationships with pick-up lines. A few started
flirting within days of joining Whyville and
continued it for about a month, dropping the
practice almost entirely for several months.
One boy (Brad/Vulcan61) started flirting only
after he had already spent an entire month on
Whyville, did it for a few weeks, then stopped.
In contrast, flirting was consistently a central
activity for another boy (Aidan/Masher47), but
he never moved beyond the initial stages of
forming a relationship. Amongst the girls, two
pursued flirting and dating beyond the initial
solicitation of relationships. For one of these
girls (Isabel/Ivy06), flirting became her primary
pattern of interacting with others, whether she
way playing in the after school gaming club
or at home. Conducting a qualitative analysis
of the logfile data allowed us to observe these
shifts in participation across time and space
and provided us with a more nuanced portrait
of tween players flirting and dating practices.
In other words, we were able to observe flirting
and dating practices that were fairly common
among all Whyvillians as well as the nuanced
ways in which players adopt these practices
as their own.
DisCussion
Using a multi-modal investigation, we sought
first to understand and confirm the prevalence
of flirting and dating interactions in Whyville by
triangulating our data in a traditional way. Fur-
thermore, we aimed to broaden our perspective
on the range of anticipatory flirting and dating
practices that had not been observed before
in virtual worlds. Our investigations of tween
flirting and dating practices revealed nuances
and diversity in how much, in what ways, and
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is prohibited.
for how long tweens flirted in Whyville. Most
interestingly our analyses revealed differences
between the presence of flirting and the ways
it is discussed in public forums. These findings
alone provide rich material for discussion for
those interested in tween development in online
spaces, something beyond the scope of this
article. Here we will briefly discuss some of
the discrepancies we observed in flirting and
dating interactions and address some of the
challenges we observed in using a multi-modal
investigation.
The relatively negative opinions about
flirting and dating in Whyville published in The
Whyville Times contrasted with the widespread
prevalence of these activities. We suspect that
part of this has to do with player expertise
(Stevens, Satwicz, & McCarthy, 2008). In
other words, as we saw in most of the case
studies, newer players are more likely to try
out widespread flirting while more experienced
players tend to develop a preference for par-
ticular activities or areas of the virtual world.
For instance, one of the most experienced boys
became a dealer of hard-to-find face parts on
Whyville and spent most of his time at the trad-
ing post completing financial transactions. Our
multi-modal approach allowed us to observe
not only that tweens did one thing and said
another in the pages of The Whyville Times,
but also that variables such as player expertise
are important. Thus, we can qualify our ob-
servation that flirting and dating are relatively
common practices on Whyville by saying that
this is true mostly for newer players and usually
for a short period of time before they become
engaged in more substantive aspects of game
play in Whyville.
While multiple methods served us well in
beginning to understand anticipatory flirting and
dating of tweens, we also need to acknowledge
some limitations. Regarding our analyses of
some of the more formal discourse concerning
flirting reported in The Whyville Times, articles
are submitted by Whyvillians and selected for
publication by the paper’s editor, an employee
of the company that owns Whyville. So while
published articles represent a wide variety of
46 International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, 2(1), 40-48, January-March 2010
opinions on most subjects, we cannot assume
that the articles selected for publication are
perfectly representative of Whyvillians’ views
because we do not know all the selection criteria
that influence what is published in The Whyville
Times. Furthermore, we used logfile data to
capture the “who, when, how and where” but
supplemented this with information available
from field notes, video records, and interviews.
Making sense of logfiles qualitatively, espe-
cially longitudinally following one person over
several months, is challenging and unusual. We
did not have room in this article to detail the
case studies that provided the foundation for
our summaries of flirting and dating. The six
boys and girls, ranging in their virtual world
participation from core to peripheral players,
displayed considerable variety in their explo-
rations of romance. In some cases, we found
evidence of only light and infrequent flirting
while in others it permeated nearly all their
online interactions with others. These varia-
tions should not come as a surprise given the
transitional status of our tween players moving
from childhood into adolescence. In the end, we
understand that even adding more data sources
will not solve a fundamental conundrum of all
research—to account as fully as possible about
events, activities, and players in online and of-
fline communities.
aCknoWleDGMent
The data collection for this research was
supported by a grant of the National Science
Foundation (NSF-0411814) to the first author
while the analyses and writings were supported
by a grant of the MacArthur Foundation to
Douglas Thomas and the first author. The views
expressed are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent the views of the National
Science Foundation, MacArthur Foundation,
the University of Pennsylvania, the University
of California, Los Angeles, the University
of Southern California, or Numedeon, Inc.
Numedeon, the company that owns and hosts
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is prohibited.
Whyville.net, has no control over the publica-
tion of the results. The authors have no financial
interest or any other official relationship with
Numedeon. We appreciate Numedeon’s will-
ingness to cooperate in the research studies and
to provide access to their logfile data. Special
thanks also to Jason Fields who developed and
conducted the analysis of the chat records in
Mathematica and to Cameron Aroz who assisted
in reducing the clicks and chat to first minute-
by-minute and finally daily summaries.
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Yasmin B. Kafai is professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Pennsylvania and co-executive editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences. Her
research focuses on the design and study of new learning and gaming technologies in schools,
community programs and virtual worlds. Recent collaborations with MIT researchers have re-
sulted in the development of Scratch, a media-rich programming environment for designers of
all ages, to create and share games, art, and stories. Current projects examine creativity and IT
in the design of computational textiles with urban youth. Kafai earned a doctorate from Harvard
University while working at the MIT Media Lab.

Deborah Fields is a doctoral candidate at UCLA in the Division of Psychological Studies in

Education. With extensive experience working in areas of informal education, Fields engages
in research about learning across spaces, peer-to-peer learning & teaching, and play. These
interests have guided her studies in virtual worlds, science, and math in both formal and infor-
mal contexts. Fields’ recent work has been published in the International Journal of Computer
Supported Collaborative Learning, the International Journal of Science Education, and On
Horizon. She has a forthcoming book chapter coming out in Constructing Identity in a Digital
World published by Cambridge University Press.

Kristin Searle is a dual-degree doctoral student in the Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum
Program at the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Pennsylvania. She has studied and worked in a number of formal and informal
learning contexts, including the American Indian Teacher Training Program and the Upward
Bound Bridge/Jumpstart program, both at the University of Utah. More recently, she has begun
to explore the educational applications of virtual worlds, looking specifically at Whyville.net.
Throughout her work, Searle is interested in how identities are produced and negotiated in
educational contexts and beyond.

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is prohibited.

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