How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation

BusinessWeek has an article up about how World of Warcraft can be used in business to train employees:

How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation

This article focuses on business and training of employees, but it can just as easily relate to education and training students. Here’s a quote from one section of the article:

“In WoW, performance is measured in terms of experience points. Players accumulate these by performing a variety of tasks that become more challenging as the game progresses. As players accumulate experience points, they advance to higher levels in the game, culminating at this point in level 80 (a new add-on recently expanded the number of levels from 70 in order to keep experienced players challenged).

The degree of complexity and challenge increases dramatically as you advance across levels, and the number of experience points needed in order to advance also increases sharply with each level. Yet the number of hours required to get there actually decreases. Experienced players become adept at leveraging the resources available in and around WoW to learn faster and advance faster even as the challenges become more difficult. In contrast to the diminishing returns to learning that we often encounter in business, players in WoW appear to have joined an environment where there are increasing returns to learning.”

It’s not too far of a reach to see how these types of platforms could be adapted to schools and learning. There’s a great list of “Bottom-Line Lessons” with a paragraph or two for each lesson. See if these do not parallel what we do in education:

• Reduce barriers to entry and to early advancement
• Provide clear and rich metrics to assess performance
• Keep raising the bar
• Don’t neglect intrinsic motivations
• Provide opportunities to develop tacit knowledge, but do not neglect broader knowledge exchange
• Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging performance targets
• Encourage frequent and rigorous performance feedback
• Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

Jump to the full article to read all about this.

Virtual War of Words

The past year has seen many new efforts going virtual. There are virtual fund raisers (like the annual Relay for Life), charitable and social events, political and now war. The Gaza conflict is moving online, even invading virtual worlds. Fox News has a story up on the invasion of this war into social networks and virtual worlds:

Gaza Conflict Moves to Virtual World

A quote from the online article:

“Support groups have sprouted up on Facebook, drawing in thousands of members on both sides of the conflict. Protests erupted in “Second Life”’s virtual Israel, where demonstrators showed up to voice support for Hamas and the Palestinians.”

“In the virtual world “Second Life,” SL Israel saw protests from virtual pro-Palestinian activists when the violence in Gaza flared up.

“Lots of people yelling,” the founder of SL Israel, who goes by Beth Odets in the game, told Second Life blogger Wagner James Au. “They were going on and on with slurring obscenities about murderous Israeli forces, etc.”

Odets began ejecting the most offensive protesters from the area, she told Au.

“I had to be careful not to boot people who didn’t actually do anything wrong,” she said.”

This should not surprise anyone, as these technologies move closer to the mainstream and their populations increase, these sorts of movements are going to go to where the people are. Jump to the full article for all the details on these latest developments.

More schools using video games for teaching

The Modesto Bee has an article this week on the use of video games in education:

Got game? More and more schools using video games as teaching tools

The article talks about how video games are an integral part of many student’s lives and that this familiarity with these platforms can be used to teach in addition to entertain. A recent Pew Research Center student is quoted:

“The Pew Research Center reported in September that 97 percent of youths ages 12 to 17 play video games, and half said they played “yesterday.” Time spent glued to the screen is often particularly high in wired, affluent communities such as Fairfax, Va., where a survey this year showed that almost three out of four students play video games or use the computer an hour or more each night for things not related to school.”

Two years ago when I started the Pacific Rim Exchange program at Modesto City Schools, I encountered a lot of skepticism about the value of virtual worlds and educational gaming. Today, with the current fiscal crisis in California and tightening of school budgets, increased pressure is being placed to find applications for classroom use to allow for specific programs to continue with shrinking budgets and enrollments. Several of the districts and SCOE who are partners in the Stanislaus Virtued project are looking at virtual world applications for AP classes, especially in rural settings where they are not offered now, and for unique languages like Japanese or Chinese.

Things are certainly changing, as stated in the article:

“There is a revolution in the understanding of the educational community that video games have a lot of what we need,” said Jan Plass, co-director of the Games for Learning Institute, based at New York University and funded by Microsoft to research how video games can help learning.

This is a great article that gives a good snapshot of where we are today with these technologies on campus.

Army Arcades

The New York Times has an article up on a new recruiting tactic by the US Army, simulation and mall arcades:

Urban Tool in Recruiting by the Army: An Arcade

I’ve seen mobile recruiting trailer that are used at air shows and such that introduce potential recruits to military simulators (and other commercial shoot’em ups to bring them in). This looks like the success of these mobile operations are going upscale for urban recruitment.

The facility looks to be well equipped:

“The Army Experience Center is a fitting counterpart to the retail experience: 14,500 square feet of mostly shoot-’em-up video games and three full-scale simulators, including an AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter, an armed Humvee and a Black Hawk copter with M4 carbine assault rifles. For those who want to take the experience deeper, the center has 22 recruiters. Or for more immediate full-contact mayhem, there are the outlet stores.”

Read the full article for all the specifics.

Lawyers and Video Games

The LA Times has an article about law firms that are developing practices around the video game and virtual worlds markets.

These lawyers got (video) game

With the game industry now exceeding even the music industry, and resisting the economic downturn, lawyers are seeing a new virtual landscape to hang their virtual shingle.

A quote from the article highlights the connection people have with these virtual worlds:

“Games aren’t like software,” he said. “People who play them feel a deep intimacy with the game. They feel very attached to the virtual items they acquire in the game through hundreds of hours of playing it. That presents some interesting twists in property law.”

And if people are interacting and transacting in these virtual environments, there are bound to be disputes between players. Enter the lawyers”

“Legal issues arising from virtual worlds — online environments in which members socialize or play games — have themselves become the subject of a book titled “The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds.”"

Jump to the full article at the above link for the whole story.