APA went pretty well — I saw a few interesting talks, and saw a bunch of stuff that I found frankly perplexing. I’ve never fully understood this odd mish-mash of clinical practitioners and social scientists, I admit, and it was odd to be at an academic conference which had more opportunities for massage than research results which address how people use media. Regardless, our symposium on videogames and learning went swimmingly — good attendance, great talks, and interesting discussion — and now seems to have garnered a nice life in the press afterwards.

I presented a paper called “Informal Scientific Reasoning in Online Game Forums” by Constance and myself, discussing our work studying informal science reasoning in the World of Warcraft forums. If you’re unfamiliar with this work, check out a pair of older blog posts on Constance’s research blog by Constance and by me on the topic.

Unfortunately, Constance couldn’t make the meeting, so she graciously sent me along to deliver the paper, which has received some media attention. Though the message of “Hey parents, games aren’t all bad!” is certainly not a new spin (nor a terribly interesting one anymore), it was nice to see the press jump on the APA’s press release. I’ve been having fun tracking where the AP wire piece (by Steve LeBlanc) has ended up, so here’s a partial list of site/media outlets that have picked up either the state wire report or the later revision, which went national yesterday.

• CNN
• MSNBC
• NPR
• USA Today
• Fox News
• The Guardian
• Kotaku
• SFGate
• WoWInsider [Hm, does it undercut our findings when the biggest WoW blog completely misreads the press release and combines our study with Gentile's?]
• Gamepolitics [Are those commenters named "Jack" just fakes or is the real Jack Thompson commenting on our symposium?]

… and a bunch of other newspapers, TV stations, etc., including at least one in Spain, and one in Hong Kong. Pretty nice!

Again, it was a worthwhile experience. I’m interested in further challenging the discourse among psychologists (a profession I once considered myself training for, sort of) that surface depictions of violence in media outweigh the learning practices that people get from playing with these kinds of interactive environments. It’s pretty much incontrovertible at this point, and it’s nice that the media are still finding it worthwhile to write about.

Of course, I’d still prefer a day (hopefully soon) in which the simple fact that “games involve learning” is common knowledge, and thus no longer newsworthy.