Let's Talk About the "V" Word...

[PeggySheehy]

Here's an article to get us going...
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/gamesfrontiers0520
From: GameLife Your Source for Gaming News Since 20XX
Some interesting insights into the issue of violence in video games...
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive’s observations on his blog, collision detection.

[Lisa Linn/Clare Lane]

Good article Peggy. What I'd like to know is whether or not game developers are "seeing" a changing demographic? There is no doubt that the main consumer target is young men, but given the growth of SL and other virtual environments, and considering the fact that we have a WoW guild of close to 70 teachers, will they begin to concentrate on the intellectual aspects of gaming? As more adults study and understand the bigger picture, I should think that the smart developers will look at research like this and respond accordingly.

The violence in games like Grand Theft Auto and others, tends to put me off -I want to move forward with the game without so much distraction. Challenges can have violence without it being gratuitous as so many of these games are. Just my notion, and I'm a newbie... Anyone else?

[Mark Suter]

We have a teacher guild? May I ask what server, the guild name, and the GM's name? What a great opportunity/excuse to interact with people in the same pursuit of WoW in education! I may just have to bring my account out of dormancy...

[linda polin]

Hi. New to the site, but not to gaming. Couple of thoughts.

First, I worry when we don't differentiate the perceptual frames that adults and kids use to make sense of gameplay. Up until high school, my daughter did not share my moment of sadness when I'd drive by a road kill squirrel, for instance. I'd say, "awww poor squirrel," and she'd say something like "guess he wasn't fast enough." She wasn't being flip; she just didn't look at death, or possibly squirrels, the way I did. I play WoW and have done so for 4 years. My daughter plays. I have played in guilds with kids as young as middle school. I find them considerably less inclined to "teabag" a corpse (a way of taunting) or "gank a noob" (kill a new player of a much lower level than you are) than the twenty-somethings in the guild. I wish I could recall or re-find the source for a study I read a long time ago that found that violence on the evening news had a greater negative impact on children than did violent cartoons. The explanation given was that even children were able to perceive the news as 'real' and therefore possible, whereas cartoons were neither.

Second, I have seen kids (and adults) kill little rabbits or cows, apparently gratuitously, but it is also generally accepted in WoW as a way to 'level a weapon' (increase your skill value wielding a weapon type). In this case the cultural surround of the game can impart meaning to the act that differs from the meaning we might assume in another setting, say, real life. In player vs player fighting, it is considered bad behavior to 'camp' a dead player, that is, to sit by his body and wait for him to return so you can kill him easily when he resurrects at low health. The fact that there is specialized language, such as ganking and camping, to describe inappropriate behavior suggests that there is a legitimate cultural surround at work here, and we must be sure to account for that before we ascribe meaning to player behaviors.

For reasons I'll not bother with here, I started reading some of the lore behind WoW and found it altered my game play, largely in my interpretation of my actions in quests and the meaning I ascribed to locations and events. I know that the narrative backbone in Quest Atlantis is an intentional focused effort to connect actions with particular contexts for meaning. Perhaps if we think about WoW in education we might be well served to foreground more intentionally both the game culture (eg, that camping is bad) and the MMO tale. (Frankly, it's not too much different from the Greek and American mythology we cover in elementary classrooms, albeit not what I'd call literature.)

[PeggySheehy]

Linda - what extraordinary insights- thanks so much fr contributing - I surely hope you find yor way to the wiki where we are developing the "core curricular" activities - and I think it might be a great asset to our work if you were able to invite your daughter to do so as well. The student voice is vital to our success... Thank you again....

[linda polin]

'Twas fun to meet you at GLS. I thought it was a wonderful coincidence that our last keynote addressed the violence issue. I am hoping they will be streaming the presentations as they did in the past. If so, I'll be sure to drop a link here. For those who weren't present... the closing keynote was (quoting his bio): "Dr. Larry Kutner is one of America’s best-known psychologists. He trained at the Mayo Clinic and is on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where he’s the co-director and co-founder of the Center for Mental Health and Media." His presentation: Grand theft childhood. Making Sense of Teens' Respsonses to Violent Video Games.

[PeggySheehy]

Absolutely! There were incredible connections happening at GLS for the work we are investigating here! Still haven't aligned the "level 1 naked gnome run" to standards but I'm working on it! Thanks for making me feel so welcomed!