Sooner or later, people who get to know me find out that I've been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for the last decade, though graduate school has definitely curtailed my hours in Azeroth. What they may not know is that online games like WoW are a treasure trove of metadata, which is used by both the game companies and the players to a fascinating extent.
From the moment a player creates a character and logs into World of Warcraft for the first, every event that happens to that character is logged, and every option the player chooses to exercise for that character is not only recorded, but factored into the character's performance in the game world. Anyone would expect obvious things to be tracked and factored in, like whether a character has added a better piece of armor or been dealt a damaging blow, has completed the requirements for a specific quest, or accrued enough reputation points with a specific faction to be considered "friendly." But WoW tracks everything, including minutiae like how many fish a character has caught, how many different critters the character has '/love'd, and how many critters the members of a guild have collectively killed.
On the player side, massive websites are dedicated to collecting that stream of metadata and turning it into useful guides that help players with everything from choosing gear to understanding confusing quest instructions to proper etiquette in a raid group. Blizzard, the company that makes WoW, makes an API available so that the player community can design add-ons to the game that leverage this stream of metadata.
So here's an interesting thing to think about. You might expect that having this metadata available would change player behavior in ways that bring about obvious improvements to the play experience--knowing the best gear for your character class or the best place to find a certain monster are sure winners. However, there's another aspect to this metadata collection, and that is the Achievement System. A very few achievements grant a tangible in-game reward, like a pet, mount, or title. The rest grant nothing more than a filled-in icon in the achievements screen and some "achievement points" that are worth precisely nothing in or out of the game. And yet, despite achievements having ostensibly no value, the mere satisfaction of earning them is enough to drive player behavior. I'm no exception: when I play, I dutifully target every new critter I see in the game world and type "/love" for no other reason than eventually it will earn an achievement. I simply can't help myself, and the comments in WoW player sites tell me I'm not alone. For the same reason, I kill every rat that spawns in the iron mine that's part of my little garrison. I know that if I keep it up, eventually my guild will earn the "Critter Kill Squad" achievement for wiping out 50,000 of the little blighters. I've even incorporated it into my mental roleplaying, "maintaining good hygiene in my mine."
So how on Earth does this apply to libraries and metadata? What if libraries tracked user behavior this carefully? Would it be utterly creepy for libraries to do this even though we are totally OK with online games doing it? What if libraries granted achievements and gave out badges? What would the rewards be? Purely social--perhaps a "leader board" of the most active researchers? A notation on your diploma--"bibliographic searcher extraordinaire"? Extra credit--"added controlled vocabulary metadata tags to 1,000 items in the XX digital library"? How might this fit in with online learning, gamification, and other education trends? Feel free to share your ideas, likes, or dislikes in the comments!
