Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Learner Motivation in MMORPGs - Research Review

I had the wonderful opportunity this week to read an article by a fellow serious game advocate that will be published.  What was nearly as interesting as the article itself, was the timing of being able to read this just after my previous posting. I feel his research was actually very relevant to the concept of game attitudes and refocusing our attention on the needs they meet and the benefits provided by games toward learning.  Min Lun Wu's article is intriguing in several ways to a field of research that is still relatively new and emerging.  He and his team chose to study casual and non-gamers interests rather than the opinions of students who play regularly.  In looking at MMORPGs which often have a high learning curve and are intimidating to non-players, this is a step in the right direction toward understanding real-world implications of implementing these games.  Additionally, rather than jumping the gun and looking at vocabulary increases or actual effects of the game, it questions the very basis of why we should use them and attempts to empiricize the factors associated with this issue.  While effects are very important, I believe we have to fully explore the basic principles and reasoning involved in using games in order to work toward a truly digital learning environment in a world where traditional lessons still rule.

While my own work focused on sociocultural theory, his research isolated the motivations for games and how that may relate to learning.  This research is framed in self-determination theory and Yee's 10 subcomponents of motivation.  Both of these formats identify a need for autonomy, challenge, and socialization.  Upon concluding the findings of which aspects of motivation were provided by the game, Min Lun Wu's article also investigated what benefits toward language acquisition were actually perceived by the players.  The overlapping factor was the aspect of socialization and teamwork, and this is wherein lies the strongest benefit of games to learning, and especially in language learning. I have also identified a strong correlation between the social communities of games and the scaffolding effect required by sociocultural theory for learning. This is one of the major necessities for language learning, a need often unmet by traditional classrooms with an instructor-audience dynamic. Of course teachers attempt to provide an environment for interaction but in the real world, students are shy, nervous, anxious about their skills or how they will be perceived, and in all honesty they are only able to spend time practicing with other students of the language who may not even be able to provide the correction and feedback that is needed.

Games provide access to an entire world of native speakers of the target language, which is something that traditional classes will most likely never be able to provide.  This article will provide essential foundation to the world of serious games by empiriczing the issues often brought up only as theory. Of course research students as myself can say that theoretically, games have the assets that are deemed necessary by researchers and theorists on education. However, to utilize more than one framework on motivation, including those that have been applied to fields outside of education and allow non-gamers the opportunity to personally identify where they see benefit and value in games both as it relates to motivation theories as well as how they believe it does via open-ended questions allows us a very different sort of insight into the role games can play.

But: here are some questions as food for thought that I keep coming back to in reading any research on the matter.

1. What are the issues related to balancing the main benefit of MMORPGs, to me the huge player base which provides the scaffolding opportunities, with the extreme lack of player base in any language other than English?  Of course this is beneficial for ESL, but can it ever be extended to a large group of American language learners- students trying to meet foreign language requirements or learning languages for careers?

2. What is the true availability of these games?  Many such as World of Warcraft actually have a pretty steep expense of $15 a month after the first few levels, which for non-players may be just enough to discourage learners.

3. Is there room and is it worth it to customize content in the form of an MMORPG?  In addition to customizing for language or availability - what about the language that students actually encounter?  Many issues, as identified by Min Lun Wu, include archaic language (many of these games have a medieval theme and include archaic English terms), topics that are rather isolated to the game world (guild, ogre, warlock, etc.), and the issue of players avoiding communicative opportunities.  Sometimes due to an underdeveloped confidence in ability to play the game and complete quests, a player may avoid combat or competition in game and thus lose the opportunity to practice this sort of communication and the need to work in a team to accomplish said goals. While players often appreciate the ability to discover their world, walking around a forest and shooting at the wildlife for gold coins and increased mana will not provide the quality interaction that is necessary for language development. How do we ensure that the gameplay provides language content that is actually relevant for use outside the gaming realm?

4. Lastly there is the recurring issue of time.  Given the learning curve, character customization, load time - how valuable is game play as a learning tool? How do we contrast "one hour of game time" with the actual amount of time spent on interaction and thus time toward learning development?  What exactly is it we are testing these games for: use in the classroom, use in place of the classroom (in this case, where will game play occur and when?) or lastly, possibly only as a supplement to traditional classroom learning?  This will determine how beneficial/detrimental the use of games as it pertains to time will be and this is a question that is often avoided.

Overall, this article has definitely provided some very interesting facts and a new perspective on the use of games in language learning and I am very interested to see where it goes.  However, as all great research does, we are left with more questions to answer and I await the response to this call for future research.


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