GamerNode: Columns - A Gaming Civic Lesson

A Gaming Civic Lesson

I have been playing World of Warcraft for a few years now. The persistent world inhabited by characters I recognize and befriend is fundamental to my enjoyment of the game. There is an exhilaration from accomplishing a complex fight with twenty-four friends that only an MMO player can experience. Not only do these communal battles offer fat loots, they also offer a decent civics lesson. 

Last week, Michigan's Capital Times published an article covering a speech given by University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor Constance Steinkuehler regarding online games creating better citizens. She made her argument during a speech entitled "Learning and Virtual Worlds: The Education Benefits of Digital Technologies" as part of a free event in a series of monthly lectures hosted by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Evenings. MMOs, she argues, are often more diverse than the players' immediate social circles.

"Learning how to navigate that diversity is 'in the big scheme of life' about citizenship, she said. Videogames are a 'push' technology that pushes things like powerful computers and videogame systems into our homes. But they also push social norms and practices because those things are necessary to succeed at highly complex MMOGs like World of Warcraft. Steinkuehler quoted Will Wright, who said in a Wired magazine story that gamers' mind-set means they 'treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption.'"

Often without realizing it, MMO players will interact with all sorts of individuals from different socio-economic, ethnic and regional backgrounds of all ages. I have personally interacted with married couples, a father and son, and twin sisters from around the world. Though it may even sound silly to gamers, Professor Steinkuehler is correct in suggesting norms are created, taught, and learned in gaming communities. There is most definitely a gamer culture and even gamer sub-cultures. Thus, it should not be surprising to hear that gamers, who frequently interact with each other, will develop socially constructed methods of communication to accomplish tasks. Guilds will often have rituals and forms of punishment and reward to encourage certain types of behavior, which is one of the reasons many "hardcore" players shun pick-up-groups. There are also unspoken rules about raid behavior that is common across MMO worlds.

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