My partner Tom and I spoke to Poudre School District counselors Thursday. Tom’s topic was the addictive potential of online games. Agreed: Gaming is a problem when it takes over. As a counterbalance to that concern, I asked What is positive about gaming? What is there to respect in in? Why do kids play? Why are so many kids so interested? At the core of that, I asked, What cognitive and social learning potential may exist in online games?

I think many adults customarily ask “Why do they play this game?” I asked the group to ask instead, “Why do they play this game?”

It was a great group – full of ideas and quickly focused on critical questions like how we could help kids find balance in their online gaming. I gave participants an outline of possible categories of learning, based on the concept of effective real-world intelligence that lies at the heart of Grow With the Flow. I promised to post some of my own thoughts on those categories – on the learning potential of games.

In my talk, I focused on MMORPGs: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games – games like Everquest, Asheron’s Call, some of the endless versions of Final Fantasy, and the charmingly antiquated Runescape. They have perhaps the greatest potential both positively, in what skills can be developed, and negatively, in their addiction potential. I talked about one MMORPG in particular: World of Warcraft (WoW)

I don’t play WoW, but I had excellent informants, all men in their late 20s - mid 30s: a computer programmer, game dabbler, with friends who are serious players, and friends who write games for a living; a grad student mathematician / astronomer who has always preferred board games; a young father, corporate professional with gaming background, who lives in the world of on-the-job electronic tools; a current player who fits in a few hours of play around work and school, and who generously (and patiently!) led me through the “What’s going on?” of a couple screenshots from WoW.

My informants urged me to emphasize this key point: To look at gaming and see its good, you have to cut through the surface and the theme to the nature of the play. Whether a game is about elves, aliens, or soldiers matters less than the challenges posed and the skills needed to play well. That isn’t easy to do with W0W. The surface can be freaky to adults; my first screenshot showed an Undead Warlock, a member of the Horde. If you stop looking when you hear that, you’ll never get to what matters.

On January 11, 2007, Blizzard Entertainment announced that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft has reached a new milestone, with 8 million players worldwide. The game is one part of a $10.5 billion industry in 2005. If your plan is to wait until it goes away….

Some basics: When you play WoW, you are always online, in a world populated at every moment by many thousands of other real-life people. You are playing a character, an avatar, who develops specialized abilities. At all but basic levels, you are likely to be playing in a guild, a team, which coordinates characters with different abilities to be successful on a mission. All the play – this is critical – is in real time (RT): If you go to dinner or bed, play continues. To learn more, check the World of Warcraft website or the Wikipedia article on World of Warcraft.

I won’t redo my talk here, so what follows is more or less the answer sheet for a quiz you didn’t take unless you were there. If you’re interested in the details, you may want to sit down with a WoW player and these ideas, and ask them whether I got some of it right – Do they see these same learning potentials in WoW? The broad categories here are taken from Grow With the Flow. I also used some much earlier development notes from Panlaudy, a game Paul and I developed; I hope to post about that someday. These are just my casual thoughts – some categories are left blank “as an exercise for the reader,” as a math text might say. (Meaning, I don’t have all weekend to get this posted!)

A GWTF Analysis of the Learning Potential of Gaming
(Using WoW as an example)

Basic Cognitive Abilities — The First Tributary

While areas like Energy Level, Attention, General Learning Style, and General Memory Processes are involved, and may be sharpened, Grow With the Flow focuses early development through this category, so I exclude it here.

Many Ways to Be Smart — The Second Tributary

• Body Intelligence – reflexes, energy management, control of impulsivity
• Personal Intelligence – Most play is in teams (Guilds) – task-oriented communication, social stability in the team (keeping up the chatter), negotiating coordinated plans, maintaining motivation and coordinated action, conflict resolution. ("Stand by me!"), social voice under pressure, supporting teammates under stress (See also “Team Player,” below)
• Visual-Spatial Intelligence – maps and map-to-situation conversions, map to game spatial reasoning, mapping the abstraction onto the game reality, converting 2D external representations to 3D internal representations, observing surroundings, switching observation scale (big picture < --> immediate surroundings); reading, interpretation, and analysis of complex, interrelated visual displays with vital information
• Language Intelligence –
• Reading and Writing Intelligence –
• Number Intelligence – quantitative analysis (distance and position, evaluating relative strengths, numerical projections)
• Musical Intelligence – Especially if you’re a fan of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky period!

The Director — Management Functions — The Third Tributary

• Organization and Coordination of Effort
  * Data Integration Leading to Actions (Fast analysis, reasoning, problem solving, predictions, based on multiple inputs (position, characteristics, resources, support, personal skills, social reading of teammates), with consequences for actions. Strategies based on analysis, which may need to be adjusted or abandoned. Coordinating tactics to advance strategic plans) –
  * Resource management –
• Multitasking – RT, cross-modality, complex, constant, critical
• Time Management – All play is RT, with critical consequences for poorly distributed use of time
• Thinking and Problem Solving (Including Strategic Planning and Control, Information Gathering and Evaluation, Forming Hypotheses and Possible Solutions, Using the Tools of Problem Solving and Logic, Settling on and Evaluating Solutions) –
• Metacognition – Ask a player about how he thinks about the act(s) of playing the game. You may be surprised at the depth.
• Flexibility / Adaptability –
• Team Player (Including both Compliance and Cooperation and going Beyond Compliance) – Advanced levels require cooperation – you can’t succeed “by running around” on your own – you join a guild with other people and go on cooperative missions together.

Motivation — The Fourth Tributary

• Involvement – This may be where the continuum goes to addiction.
• Management of Motivation and Emotions – Self management of emotions under pressure, coming back from failure, perseverance

Knowledge, External Intelligence, Info Management — The Fifth Tributary

• Orientation to Knowledge – knowledge is essential to success, ignorance or faulty information has dire consequences
• Knowledge Base – rote memory, knowledge acquisition (terminology, characteristics, development hierarchies
• External Intelligence – a very large knowledge base is available, which can improve play. Some of that knowledge is developed cooperatively – see sites like Thotbot. (Run your mouse over the headings to see the subcategories.)
• Information Management–