My view of computer gamers has changed over the course of the past week. A week ago I spent an hour or so with other staff members watching and discussing the first few segments of the PBS documentary, "Digital Nation." One segment focused on children in Korea that had to be sent from their homes to special camps to try and break their addiction to computer gaming. And, of course, I thought "how terrible." These games were so seductive as to get kids to spend all of their time playing online, at the cost of their home life and relationships with their families.
Then I read the segment "Geeking Out" from the MacArthur Foundation report "Living and Learning with New Media."
'People who geek out engage with media and technology in an intense, autonomous and interest-driven way.'
In the report it describes how kids have created networks that collaborate to create cheats, (cheating in a video game), to find ways to beat the computer. Others learn to be fansubbers or amateur writers of subtitles for videos. But what really blew me away was the description of the linkshells for Final Fantasy XI. These people have formed a sophisticated guild.
"The participants organized the linkshell in a hierarchical system, with a leader and officers who had decision-making authority, and new members needed to be approved by the officers. Often the process of joining the linkshell involved a formal application and interview, and members were expected to conform to the standards of the group and perform effectively in battle as a team. The linkshell would organize 'camps' where sometimes more than 150 people would wait for a high-level monster to appear and then attack with a well-planned battle strategy. Gaming can function as a site for organizing collective action, which can vary from the more lightweight arrangements of kids getting together to play competitively to the more formal arrangements that we see in a group such as Cody's linkshell."
These people are demonstrating many skills that the current job market demands employees to have. They can collaborate, organize, synthesize, evaluate, create and communicate within the organization. Hitting many of the levels of Bloom's digital taxonomy. Through gaming these kids (and maybe some are not so young?) have made themselves marketable by gaining real-life skills the workplace of the future values!
Now they may need to work on the balance that is so necessary to have a happy life!
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What is amazing about World of Warcraft is the diversity of people that play the game. I have a friend in Ed Tech who wanted to learn more about the gaming world and stopped blogging, and doing anything else and for 6 months spent all his free time in World of Warcraft (WOW). When he reemerged 6 months later he had stories that just blew me away. He was in a guild with others as young as 10 and as old as 55. He played with a CEO of a major US based company, a guy from Google, and regular kid and a couple college students. He talked about the strategies that they had and although a lot of what we think about is the battles that wage on in WOW he said the majority of the time was spent building things, finding resources, and making deals with other guilds for supplies. Very little of it had to do with actual fighting. Part of me would love to join the world for a bit. What I need to do it get back into Second Life. I haven't been in there for awhile and I would love to see how it's changed.
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