Designing for sociable systems requires, among other abilities, a sensitivity to the meanings, structures, and nuances of technology-mediated experiences that are simultaneously felt by users to be intimate and also social. Such a sensitivity is not easily acquired, and design researchers have recommended the use of social theories to guide designers' readings of technology-mediated social experiences. We use philosopher Michel Foucault's theory of identity (and social power, discourse, sexuality, creativity, and style) known as "the care of the self," as a scaffold with which to produce a sensitive interpretation of the intimacy (and expert social creative) practices of adult users of the virtual world Second Life (SL). This reading sheds light on several skilled and creative intimacy practices in SL. It also offers a philosophically grounded hermeneutic strategy for designers interested in analyzing intimate experiences.

In recent years, HCI has shown a rising interest in the creative practices associated with massive online communities, including crafters, hackers, DIY, and other expert amateurs. One strategy for researching creativity at this scale is through an analysis of a community's outputs, including its creative works, custom created tools, and emergent practices. In this paper, we offer one such case study, a historical account of World of Warcraft (WoW) machinima (i.e., videos produced inside of video games), which shows how the aesthetic needs and requirements of video making community coevolved with the community-made creativity support tools in use at the time. We view this process as inhabiting different layers and practices of appropriation, and through an analysis of them, we trace the ways that support for emerging stylistic conventions become built into creativity support tools over time.

In this paper, we look at the prominent World of Warcraft machinima community as an expert amateur online com-munity and present a multi-part study of a canon of the most successful works (i.e., machinima videos) produced by this community. By focusing our study on its roughly 300 most successful examples, the determination of which we explain in the paper, we are able to highlight the evolv-ing visual practices, tools, and aesthetic sensibilities of the community. Chiefly, our study identifies how creativity support tools and visual practices are inextricably linked and mutually support the in-kind development of the other. For WoW machinima and its producers, the affordance of creativity tools and the cultivation of visual skill synced at key moments and in powerful ways to support the rapid growth, experimentation, and refinement of amateur exper-tise at the individual and community levels.

With the rise of massive scale, globally distributed creative communities, such as Deviant Art, Etsy, and Minecraft, the role of creative leadership in sociotechnical systems is worth investigating. This paper presents a case study of one strategy Etsy, one such online creative community, uses to articulate the creative dispositions of the community's exemplar members: Featured Seller interviews. For this study, we report on a combined content analysis and close reading of Featured Seller interviews on Etsy.com, followed up with member check interviews. Our analysis highlights the demographics of featured sellers, the ways in they express their identities and creative processes, and how they position themselves within the broader Etsy community. Our findings demonstrate that Etsy's administrators provide both a platform and scaffolding for community leaders to co-articulate with them the creative ideals they believe will strengthen the bonds of the Etsy community.

In spite of decades of research on virtual worlds, our understanding of one popular form of virtual world behavior - raiding - remains limited. Raiding is important because it entails intense, high-risk, and complex collaborative behaviors in computer-mediated environments. This paper contributes to CSCW literature by offering a longitudinal analysis of raiding behavior using system data manually collected from the game world itself, comparing two raiding teams as they worked through the same content. Supplemented with interviews and chat transcripts, this research sheds light on what actually happens during raids across four different temporal scales: seconds, hours, days, and months. It also distinguishes between behaviors that are imposed by the system design and those chosen by players. Finally, it derives two viable raiding styles from the data.

In this paper we present a critical analysis of player accounts of intimacy and intimate experiences in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). Our analysis explores four characteristics that players articulated about their virtual intimate experiences: the permeability of intimacy across virtual and real worlds, the mundane as the origin of intimacy, the significance of reciprocity and exchange, and the formative role of temporality in shaping understandings and recollections of intimate experiences. We also consider the manifest ways that WoW's software features support and encourage these characteristics.

Cyberinfrastructure is a rapidly growing area of global research and funding with a history of emphasizing the role technology will play in changing scientific work practices. This paper proposes a practice-theoretic perspective that is informative to cyberinfrastructure research and design. To illustrate the relevancy of a practice-theoretic perspective to cyberinfrastructure, this paper presents a critical review of 160 cyberinfrastructure research papers and reports published in the last decade through a perspective of embodied practice. After relating common cyberinfrastructure research themes through a focus on embodied practice, we propose a series of early implications for design aimed at incorporating the lessons of embodied practice into the design and development of future cyberinfrastructure applications.

Gaming has attracted growing interest in both CSCW and HCI in recent years. We contribute to this line of research by analyzing collaboration in 5-person instance runs in World of Warcraft, an aspect of the game that is considered routine and mundane work by players yet remains largely unexamined in current literature. Using a combination of ethnographic observation, interview, chat and video log analysis, we unpack the conditions under which players can produce the most effective outcomes while having fun, and offer a three-level model of successful instance runs.