The Idle Educator

Recently I was in a meeting that brought up a sore issue of mine and basically rubbed salt in the wound about video games and education. First of all, I'd like to point out that I know less than a handful of educators that actually play video games (out of the vast many I know) which makes this a completely foreign topic to them. This in turn ruffles my feathers when I hear them talking about something they have no clue about in a scholarly method. It's like watching a bunch of older people trying to be hip with the new trendy teenage lingo...awkward and robotic.

This subject has been on the debate block inside my organization (and others previous to this) for a while now and I couldn't quite figure out what really bothered me about the whole subject besides the fact that they're trying to take something I hold dearly and bastardize it into a cardboard cut out of it's former self (if you've ever heard the game ideas educators have...oh boy). However, this recent meeting finally gave me the epiphany that I was looking for, it's not that educators want to use video games, like I had thought. It's the fact that they want a perfect game RIGHT NOW without all the years of hard work the game industry has put into it to make it what it is today OR the research to see what today's big name games offer education.

I'd like to use World of Warcraft (WoW) as the example to press this since this is the most hotly debated game at these meetings. To begin with, WoW was not produced in a night. In fact, it didn't just pop out of Blizzard's creation team's head either. This game is a product of the industries' evolution. If you've ever played the Warcraft games that came before WoW, you'd know that each gets progressively better. You can also see that they've borrowed elements from other MMORPG's such as Ultima, Everquest, and others (each which went through their own evolutionary processes). That being said, WoW took all that had come before it, weeded out the best elements of those games and put them together to make what it is work. This is not something that just materialized, it EVOLVED.

I think Educators fail to realize this. They don't understand that WoW was built with the foundations of past gaming experiences. They think that it's some phenomena that just popped out of the air with no past to collect from. And this leads me to my second pet peeve, the inability to research.

Educators are supposed to be the ones that collect data and interpret it for the public (this is a very loose definition). Yet I find it amazing at the lack of research they do on subjects such as this since they don't see research as relevant. Since it isn't scholarly, they don't need to look at it in a scholarly way. I find this appalling since most instant hits in today's world aren't considered scholarly at all, which squeezes what is considered scholarly into a continually smaller space labeled "boring."

You want a WoW for your class or museum, then why aren't you researching why it's so big? Why aren't you looking at the history of it? Stop looking at this in a one-dimensional way and LEARN about it. Teach Greek mythology by referencing God of War or World War II with Medal of Honor by utilizing what's already out there. Perhaps you need to find ways to incorporate video games into learning instead of trying to force learning into video games?