MMORPG Researcher Interview
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 1103
Q: Tell us about your studies regarding games. What interesting things have you learned?
A: Well, overwhelmingly MMOGaming is incredibly intelligent play. It's a digital intellectual playground, truth be told. I've interviewed kids who are disengaged in school and failing basic coursework turn around and do high-level complex thinking and learning in the MMOG they play: write sophisticated arguments over ethics and social structures/relations, collect data and build mathematical models of the game dynamics in an effort to find the best exploit, research topics in history as a way to craft engaging fan-fictions related to the game.
The irony is that these are all highly valued practices in varying academic fields (philosophy / sociology, science, history / creative writing) yet gameplay is treated in many circles as barren play (as Solomon put it in his recent editorial in the New York Times, such digital activity is torpid' and 'by and large invite inert reception') or, worse still, a root cause of social ills like violence (Anderson's studies), anti-social behaviors (Provenzo), you name it. I'm suspicious of these sorts of diatribes against technology (gaming, in particular, MMOGaming especially) given our culture's tendency to meet nearly every new invention with the rhetoric of salvation (they will change the world as we know it in all ways good) or the apocalypse (they will be our downfall). Neither is ever true.
In my work, I try to ask the question: What ARE people doing in games, and in what ways does it align (or fail to align) with forms of intellectual work we value outside them? And what I'm finding contradicts what's often claimed in the popular press.
