Can massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft produce better citizens?
That’s the provocative conclusion drawn by University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor Constance Steinkuehler, who has been intensely studying MMOGs and those who play them — including herself — for several years.
On Tuesday night, she laid out the evidence in a presentation called “Learning and Virtual Worlds: The Education Benefits of Digital Technologies” at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Lecture Hall. The free event was part of the series of monthly Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Evenings.
With about 12 million people playing World of Warcraft alone, MMOGs have become a new “third place” like “Cheers,” where everyone knows your name and all that, Steinkuehler said.
Players “hang out and engage with one another in informal social ways,” she said. “Most people go for the game and stay for the people.”
Interacting with people from all over and of all backgrounds exposes players to far more diversity than they get from their immediate social circle of friends and family, she said.
“I grew up in a small town in Missouri,” Steinkuehler said. “Kids today are growing up in thoroughly networked global spaces.”
Learning how to navigate that diversity is “in the big scheme of life” about citizenship, she said.
Video games are a “push” technology that pushes things like powerful computers and video game 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 said.
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.”
Steinkuehler began her presentation with a tutorial on MMOGs, which also include Madden Sports, Guitar Hero, role-playing games, investigation games and others.
World of Warcraft, which debuted in 2004, is the most successful game — she called it “the new golf” for “techie hanging.”
For the uninitiated, she showed some of the “chaotic and complicated” World of Warcraft, which even has its own virtual economy dealing with the things necessary to succeed in the game.
She explained how game players she studied collaboratively use scientific problem-solving techniques to succeed in World of Warcraft.
Of course, “When I told them this was science, they said, ‘No, we’re just trying to cheat the game,’ ” she said to laughter from the crowd.
Her work included analysis of message boards where World of Warcraft players get together. She found 86 percent of the talk was “productive,” featuring very detailed questions and serious discussion, with players exchanging ideas and making counter-arguments using data and reasoning and building on each others’ ideas.
There was not a lot of “hey dude, what’s up,” she quipped.
She found that 65 percent of the discussion was “evaluative” vs. 30 percent “absolutist” — “My idea is right and not open to discussion” — and 5 percent “relative” — it’s just opinion and no one is right.
In contrast, she said studies have found that the U.S. population is only 15 percent evaluative, 50 percent absolutist and 35 percent relativist.
The World of Warcraft communities “are doing academic work of the sort we want to see in learning environments,” Steinkuehler said. “Games require an immense amount of literacy work to succeed.”
Noting that only about 20 percent of Americans are scientifically literate, she said that’s what science labs in schools produce. Kids’ attitudes are to find the right answer — “the one the teacher has” — when science is more about inquiry work of the sort being done by the gamers.
Steinkuehler likened the efforts of gamers to President Obama’s neighbor-to-neighbor tool where, for example, volunteers surveyed their neighborhoods and updated the campaign’s database.
“These (gaming) Web sites are doing essentially the same thing,” she said.