Researcher to Study Tweens and Massively Multiplayer Commercial Games
By Constance Steinkuehler • June 30, 2009
Games can foster certain skills in adults, but what about younger kids?
A growing body of research suggests that video games–especially online gameplay in (massively) multiplayer environments (MMOs) like World of Warcraft or Quest Atlantis–have real intellectual merit.
Games engage players in digital and traditional literacy skills, informal scientific reasoning, collective problem-solving, and even forms of civic and social engagement.
Yet, much of the research has focused on adults playing commercial games. Studies of youth are limited to educational games or sites like Whyville or River City.
So what about younger kids playing MMOs?
This fall, my research team and I will extend our research originally funded by MacArthur by studying commercial MMOs populated nearly exclusively by tweens and teens. With the help of a Spencer Foundation postdoctoral grant, I’ll be examining RuneScape, the single most popular online game among children age 10 to 16.
This work will begin with a “cognitive ethnography” of everyday game play. An ethnography is a form of study that relies on careful observation and in-depth interviews with subjects. We hope to identify common practices, as well as the forms of individual and social cognition that these practices entail. “Individual and social cognition” means, in this case, that we will use as units of analysis both the individual and the group for studying cognition. This is to say, we don’t assume cognition is only located in the individual head but rather is also distributed across groups of people and their tools.
As part of this work, we’re also recruiting about a dozen gaming youth to assess the impact of game play over a longer period of time on their daily lives, social relationships, and school work. We will assess what youth learn through online game play, how that learning aligns or conflicts with educational standards, and how such games fit into the fabric of their everyday experience.
What’s so cool about RuneScape? It has six million active monthly players (making it the single most popular MMO title in the West), it’s browser based and can be played for free, kids love it, and adults hate it. In other words, it’s an ideal context for investigating whether the complex forms of intellectual work found in other MMO games also emerge in online communities that are, for the most part, youth driven, entirely accessible, and thoroughly mainstream.
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