Why World of Warcraft™ is better than school

Have been looking at the reasons kids learn from computer games …

Been re-reading Mark Prensky - “Digital Game Based Learning” and James Paul Gee – “What Video Games have To teach Us About Learning and Literacy” to help me better understand why schools fail to inform or engage but World of Warcraft™, with over 1.5 million subscribers, does.

We had a house full of kids over the weekend – playing, laughing, planning, collaborating, problem finding and problem solving … kids thinking and learning through World of Warcraft™.

I know that some parents and educationalists argue that computer gaming is an essentially solitary activity.

• They have obviously never closely observed the interactions available to an online gamer.

• They have obviously never read Tony Manninen’s analysis of the Interaction Forms and Communicative Actions in Multiplayer Games

• They have obviously never watched a video of a World of Warcraft™ collaborative raid showing the interaction, collaboration and external voice chat that gamers utilize when they interact as a group.

In truth World of Warcraft offers a multiplicity of communicative interaction. Within the game you can indulge in

• Whispers – private messages sent to one person only.
• Party chat- a chat between the 5 members of your current party (a group of people working for a common goal)
• Raid chat – a larger group chat (up to 40 people).
• Guild chat – chat between a group of people allied with each other can be as small as 10 up to several hundred.
• General chat everyone who is playing in the same area as you are.

Outside the game you will see kids txting, msn, on the phone, shouting, gesturing, laughing, scrawling notes …. and, and, and …..
By the time you have worked your way through the videos and Manninem’s Instrumental/ Strategic/ Normatively Regulated/ Dramaturgical/ Communicative/ and Discursive Communicative Actions it is hard not to be convinced that multiplayer gaming offers one of the richest opportunities for communicative interaction available. Is incomparably richer than the "teaching is telling, learning is listening" pedagogy of the classroom.

Team learning and thinking is seen as a pivotal future ability. Peter Senge in "The Fifth Discipline" asks "How can a team of committed managers with individual IQs above 120 have a collective IQ of 63?" (p. 9.).He adds "Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations" (p. 10). If we accept Senge's argument then playing World of Warcraft ought to be mandatory and attendance at school a voluntary leisure activity.

And if the argument has yet to convince you then Gee’s “Reason’s Kids Learn From Games” provides the “Gladwellian tipping point” for anyone familiar with good curriculum design.

1. Doing and reflecting
2. Appreciating good design
3. Seeing interrelationships
4. Mastering game language
5. Relating the game world to other worlds
6. Taking risks with reduced consequences
7. Putting out effort because they care
8. Combining multiple identities
9. Watching their own behavior
10. Getting more out than what they put in
11. Being rewarded for achievement
12. Being encouraged to practice
13. Having to master new skills at each level
14. Tasks being neither too easy nor too hard.
15. Doing, thinking and strategizing
16. Getting to do things their own way
17. Discovering meaning
18. Reading in context
19 Relating information
20. Meshing information from multiple media
21. Understanding how knowledge is stored
22. Thinking intuitively
23. Practicing in a simplified setting
24. Being led from easy problems to harder ones
25. Mastering upfront things needed later
26. Repeating basic skills in many games
27. Receiving information just when it is needed
28. Trying rather than following instructions
29. Applying learning from problems to later ones
30. Thinking about the game and the real world
31. Thinking about the game and how they learn
32. Thinking about the games and their culture
33. Finding meaning in all parts of the game
34. Sharing with other players
35. Being part of the gaming world
36. Helping others and modifying games, in addition to just playing.

Comments

[Graham Stanley]

Great post - I'm busy researching for an online session I'm trying to organise on gaming in English language teaching - I'll definitley recommend participants come and read this

[Artichoke]

Sounds fun Graham - I'd like to know how it develops - I loved John Seely Brown's recent take on World of Warcraft in Wired Magazine - You play World of Warcraft you're hired. Why multiplayer games may be the best kind of job training.