14 DAY TRIAL // World of Wacraft is the biggest MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) out there. With over 11 million subscribers, it is the most dominant game in the world. But this popularity came with a price, more and more journalists and social organizations have claimed that the game is too addictive and causes many problems for players. Of course, many of them are just because of the prejudice and the fact that all MMO players are stereotyped as people who have weight problems and no social skills, fact disproved by surveys and studies. Now, as another argument against those people, a recent study made by Constance Steinkuehler, an educational researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has showed that the popular MMORPG helped a lot of children develop social skills and express themselves.
“Some of the eighth graders and high school freshmen who signed up for the group couldn't have cared less about writing or reading in school. Yet those students have gone from barely stringing together two sentences to writing lengthy posts in their group's Web site forum, where they discuss detailed strategies for gearing up their virtual characters and figuring out tough quests. The unschoolers' experiences, along with the early success of Steinkuehler's program, suggest that playing a video game set in a virtual online world can encourage students to learn valuable real-world skills. Steinkuehler's goal is to figure out when and how learning takes place in online games, and how popular games made for entertainment might become educational tools.”
It should not come as a shock because most of the players of WoW have developed a stronger sense of friendship with their in-game fellows and also their social skills have vastly improved after the first gaming experiences.
“What I'm deeply invested in is reinvigorating their intellectual life. I want kids to understand that games are intellectual and about problem solving, not that different from what scientists are doing in the real world,” said Steinkuehler as the motivation for conducting this survey.