Thoughts on gaming and learning

In the wake of my last post I’ve starting thinking about the broad topic of virtual worlds and gaming and my attitude towards them. As surprising as it may sound, I’ve always looked at the topic of learning through virtual worlds and MMORPGs like World of Warcraft with a fair degree of skeptical interest.

These sorts of enviroments are a fascinating phenomenon to me, not necessarily from the standpoint of the environments themselves, or the experiences they help facilitate, but with the degree of engagement, dedication and time investment that people willingly and independently put into them.

Just minutes ago in fact I echoed a similar sentiment regarding my indulgence in D&D growing up, and single-player role playing games years later. Perhaps it’s the sensation or practice of becoming someone else that pulls people in so much; the process of exploring and discovering who the character is, where they fit within their environment; how they interact and engage with the people, places and things around them; how they react to adversity and challenges – both intellectual, physical, even life-threatening – when there is absolutely no risk of injury or repercussion to them in real life.

Educators often introduce role-playing exercises into the classroom and call it a learning activity. Why is opening a virtual amory to sell plate mail, joining a war party to conduct a raid, or working collaboratively in an army to fend off an orc attack any different to this?

Remember, I’m posing these questions for my own benefit as much as I’m trying to inspire discussion around it.

I’ve yet to run across it just yet (as I said before, I’m still a n00b), but I’m told there is a vibrant unschooling community in World of Warcraft who even have their own guild where parents and children participate together. Likewise there are staff in formal educational institutions who also advocate gaming and virtual worlds as a way to foster engagement and empower the learning process by making it fun.

So why the obsession with delineating where learning stops and open-ended fun begins? Why must there be a distiction?

Certaily the dynamic is different between a controlled classroom environment and one in which social boundaries have disappeared – or rather have been re-written by a virtual socio-political realm in which real world stuctures, relationships and demographies do not exist. Then again, perhaps that’s the point.

Perhaps the real issue critics or skeptics have (realised or not) is not a lack of learning, or learning outcomes, but rather the complete divergence from existing structures and ways of managing and controlling the learning processes that virtual environments and MMORPGs entails.

Maybe that’s why so many educational “games” feel so contrived. They’re designed upon traditional pedagogies where instructors dictate learning outcomes, rather that letting them emerge through serendipity as a natural process of engagement in a meandering process that individuals themselves control

Posted via email from Mike Bogle