I’m too busy to date your avatar

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Gaming and literacy

Learning about World of Warcraft (WoW) has been interesting to find out more about what engages some members of my family in the 20-35 years age bracket. While people played up to two hours a day (but not on every day), they had all replaced TV watching with WoW or other virtual world experiences such as Second Life. So really the issue of time is addressed by replacing TV with gaming.

As I heard my family talk about WoW and why they liked it, I could see their levels of motivation and engagement were high; hence Gee’s arguments about applying gaming principles to learning are worth considering. Laura who has two main characters, a Night Elf in the Druid class and a Dwarf in the Paladin class, loves the fantasy genre and given her fascination with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, it’s not surprising that she loves WoW. She described the game as ‘complex and layered’ and she liked the way you can customise the characters and build your own identity. She also commented that the quests were challenging ‘but not too hard’ – an important learning principle Vygotsky taught us.  Jonathan who is a Dranei Knight in the Shaman class, likes the choice and how the quest lines are cumulative, building your skill level in each quest and rewarding you. He said the game makers were ‘good at making you feel special’ so he understood how the game tapped into identity and established a sense of belonging. Overall everyone liked the high interactivity and the sense of agency they felt.

The intellectual challenge is also an engagement factor with strategic thinking and problem solving skills as players must analyze and synthesize information and clues in a quest. Glen liked solving real problems and compared this to learning basic skills and rote learning. He loved medieval history and English at school so games like WoW interested him. He also commented on how the game was interactive and how he could choose the pathway for his character. He also commented on rewards which were useful like gaining new armour for his character for a future battle. School rewards such as grades are not nearly as meaningful.

It has been easy to draw out the connections of gaming to literacy. There are the obvious research skills in players finding out more about characters in quests in WoW and also by accessing other Internet sites to develop web based literacy, understanding complex narrative structures, reading sophisticated texts (often much more sophisticated than what we see in school texts), technical language, accessing and comprehending information – ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case’ as is typical in a lot of school learning. If literacy involves the reception and production of texts, reception is clearly covered here.

Within the game there are also interesting ways to communicate. The language in the narratives and lore is very descriptive and formal, while in the forums, players use more colloquial language. Players communicate through text which develops writing skills and through voice – being ‘on vent’ is the voice platform.

What really interested me was the spin offs from the game –  fan fiction, fan art, comic contest, Gadgetzan times newspaper, promotional videos, artwork, screenshots, wallpapers, real world and virtual world gaming conventions and soundtracks on iTunes.  It’s quite amazing to see so much creativity in the production of materials showing how computer games develop skills in the production of multimodal texts. Jo, a Human in the mage class with skills in alchemy and herbalism, described one spin off – The Guild, a sitcom web series which satirizes a group of online gamers. The first season was entirely financed by PayPal donations but was so successful it now has sponsors and is in its third season. There have been over 3 million views of the excerpt from the first episode on YouTube.

And nearly five million hits on a music video clip on The Guild – Do you want to date my avatar.

And just to show you the power of spin offs, there is a machinima music video clip in Second Life, entitled I’m too busy to date your avatar with 19,000 views.

And of course there is the WoW wiki, the free Warcraft universe info source anyone can edit and a forum where gamers can seek advice and support from other gamers. This illustrates the amazing learning community of WoW, something that I really love in my Illinois online course. In WoW players make friends by joining a raid and then working collaboratively with even more players in a big quest called an ‘instance’. They set up guilds to support raids and higher level (more experienced payers) support lower level players.

Teachers aspire to make students in schools feel that they belong to a community of learners. So I believe the principles of the world of gaming are worth considering in school learning.

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