Posts Tagged ‘games learning’
Massive Multiplayer Online Games and learning for fun
February 1st, 2010
My two sons are both avid online game players, the elder preferring First Person Shooter and Sports titles, the younger favouring Role Playing Games. They’ve both been playing online since they were pre-teen from Habbo Hotel to Call of Duty, FIFA to World of Warcraft and GuildWars and beyond.
Rarely, the games were gruesome and I argued against playing them. It was pointed out with great sympathy (and concern for the aged), that this was not real life. And neither son has recently gone out and attacked anyone with a recently-bought two-handed mace… to my knowledge.
When they were easily impressed by their Dad, they loved to show their skills and knowledge of games. They were then even more impressed that some of their teachers also understood, even played these games.
At the risk of sounding like a ‘Dudley Dogood’, I think online multiplayer games are one of the most excellent learning tools out there. I know there are the ‘serious games’ and explicitly ‘educational games’ genres (maybe both should come with an advisory sticker – ‘This game can seriously bore your child to death’) but it’s the real, fun games that, for me, make a difference.
There are a crop of new games due out this year and early next that will take ‘accidental learning’ to a new level. I’ll be returning to those in another post but from what I’ve seen from the early videos and early beta reviews, I might even dust off my gamer cap and really embarrass my boys online.
Think of the potential for maths, economics, politics, history, sociology, anthropology. . . teachers. If teachers immersed themselves in the online MMOs and then drew out learnings from these fantastic worlds, how engaged would their pupils be?
We know that MMOs, particularly the RPGs, are highly social and structured environments where gamers learn new social skills and knowledge every day. These game spaces also provide youth with a very cool and safe space to test out identity and roles.
My younger son, for example, learned how to lead a group (of much older people) in World of Warcraft and the elder leads online squads to victory in some nightmarish battle-torn worlds (pass the ammo). Where else can a youngster lead a group of older players with authority, friendship and respect?
As Nick Yee pointed way back out in Mosaic: “The social skills learned in these environments are highly transferable to real life. After all, providing leadership for and managing over 100 people is an incredibly complex task no matter where it occurs. What’s even more interesting is that leadership training is an emergent function of these environments. It prompts us to wonder how effective these worlds might be if they were specifically designed as educational mediums.”
Others, from Raph Koster to Nicolas Ducheneaut and Robert J. Moore at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), reinforce Nick’s view of online games as a positive learning experience – oh, and just about the best fun, ever.