Constance recently posted a video that her group prepared for a MacArthur Foundation “Worked Examples” session at this past summer’s GLS 4.0 conference. Me (and my bald spot) feature in it, and it’s an interesting — and amusing! — look at some of the activities we’ve organized while starting to get an afterschool program up and running based around World of Warcraft. Here’s the video:

(Yes, yes, I forgot where the camera was at the beginning, go ahead and laugh).

My task here was simple — at the beginning of most of our face-to-face meetings in Madison, we’d start off with getting the kids to talk a bit about what they’d done in the past month (since the previous meeting), as well as some of the goals they’ve set for themselves for the next month. We happened to be sitting near a map of Azeroth (the fantasy world where World of Warcraft is set), and this turned out to be the perfect touchstone for the kids to talk about their progress. As you can tell from the video, the kids jumped at the chance to both brag about where they’d been (which is, basically, coding their progress in leveling their characters within the game), and this led to discussions of what they cataloged in the game and how.

In particular, focus on the boy who I talk with about writing maps near the end of the excerpt — I find this to be one of the most interesting parts of the video, and a good example of the kinds of skills that can arise out of engagement with games. His approach to learning how to play the game better was, in short, to take screencaps of maps that he saw within the game, print them out, paste them to the wall behind his computer screen, and annotate them. I note that this is what us “old school” gamers had to do decades ago (I still have reams of graph papered Zork maps in a box somewhere), but it’s notable in that it ties to a variety of literacies that could extend out of the game.

This “game-based cartography” is more than just copying down maps: It involves making judgments about which maps are important for gameplay, figuring out how to annotate them in a way which will help him solve whatever problem he has at hand (in this case, tracking non-player characters in the world), and is the externalizing of cognition into paper-and-pencil tools. These are all hallmarks of being literate in these games, and all critical for his path to solving the problems that faced him in the game.

But, I note, wouldn’t we like to see kids understand the real world’s geography in similar ways? The game has worked as a gateway for this kid’s use of tools to help him make sense of the virtual world; I’d be interested to see how we could leverage these skills to better impart knowledge about geography, global economies, animal migration, etc. So many content areas feature grappling with maps and graphical representations of some kind of phenomenon, and I suspect that honing one’s skills in map-making — and seeing one’s self as a producer of knowledge and not just a map-reader — might lead toward useful applications of these game-based skills to real-world skills.

Finally, it’s interesting to hear the kids talk about the different people they’re meeting inside the game. In my opinion, it’s the distributed nature of online gameplay — and online communities around games — which may reap the greatest rewards for game-based learning in the future. I think we’ve only barely scratched the surface of the potential of games for this purpose, and we need to focus on how people collaborate, compete, and design together online. In part, that’s what I’m trying to do with my dissertation work, and hopefully as it progresses, I’ll have more to say on that.