Video games and high quality story telling

Gaming is a passion of mine (offline and online) and I have devoted way too many hours of my life to games, the study of games, and experimenting with games. For digital games that help tell a story or help learners get into stories, there are way too many options to list here. Every learner has preferences and no one game is going to fit all learners. It may be easier to share some categories and their contribution to reading and writing.

MMORPG = Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game Examples include World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Everquest and many others. In terms of reading, there are multiple hundreds of hours of textual story lines in any one of these games. Very often, the text is accompanied by high quality voice and animation. The reader is seeing, hearing and reading the textual story during hundreds of hours of game play. In terms of writing, there are many players that journal their experiences online and offline. For those students creating game play blogs, the student takes great pains to ensure they are accurate and authentic to the game as there are many critical game players out there that will jump on "noob" writing quickly. Good writing is an indication to game credibility in these blogs and forums.

RPG = Role Playing Games Examples include Skyrim, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead Redemption, Portal 2, Bioshock and others. Some of these games have thousands of hours of storylines a player experiences. Skyrim especially has a reputation for "living in a story that adapts to your actions". Players not only engage in these games for hundreds of hours for one of their characters, they will start up a number of different types of characters that all end up with different experiences within the game. Experienced players have created some interesting writing and production all within the world created by the games. It is almost as if the publishers have designed the worlds, the players have great liberties to start writing their own stories within their game play. 

CCG = Collectible Card Games Examples include Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, and hundreds of others. These games started off as cardboard card games but are now getting new life as digital experiences. Magic the Gathering was designed by a PHD mathematician and has over 13,651 unique cards published to date. The cards are published in over a dozen different languages as well. Each card has incredible art work and include flavor text that users often put together to experience the fictional worlds and histories the publishers have created. Many cards are loaded with text that describe some very complex game concepts and use some higher level vocabulary. Pokemon is another collectible game that has many text components. In fact, if you look at the special attacks the older Pokemon cards have, there were underlined words on most cards. These words were from a special vocabulary lists the publishers were given. The charge to the company was to make an addictive game that would engage kids in learning words from these lists. Now these games and others all have digital representations for today's plugged in learners. 

Although most games do not directly aim to enhance writing skills, there are aspects of almost any multiple player game that offer great learning experiences. All multi-player games have a text chat that is constantly scrolling by with conversations while a player is playing. Players must be very efficient and precise with their language because the players are coming from all over the world and English is very often not the primary language in most chats. Add in that the age of players can range over 50 years, and one can see how the maturity and clarity of the typing are often used subjectively by other players. Since every player wants to be accepted and not sound like an "immature noobie", learners often get proficient in typing so much faster than I have seen in typing tutor programs. There is much competition to get into the "good groups" at the higher levels of multiplayer games, so learners often push their efficiency and efficacy of their communication to get into those elite groups of experienced players. 

One more thought: After thousands of hours digitally and face to face playing with others, I am feeling that any game can be leveraged into a great learning experience. The trick is to ask great questions and offer exciting challenges. Most teachers don't have the time to dive into the vast world of games, never mind come up with guiding questions or challenges. This summer, one of my projects is to take at least one game and develop materials teachers could use with learners. These questions and challenges will all be designed to have students demonstrating specific learning results. My hope is that by the end of the summer, I could find some guinea pigs that would at least try to implement the questions and challenges with learners they have that already play the given game the resources will be designed for (I will be picking one of the free to play games I hope). There is so much power in games. The entertainment industry already knows that (video games have been higher profit industry than movies for a number of years), and I feel education has so many exciting possibilities of meeting learners where they spend so much free time.