World of Warcraft convention, also in the "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" video - when a woman claimed that her WoW friendships were closer than the relationships she has with people in real life. Why would that come to be? Does it indicate a serious problem for us as a society? What prevents close, genuine connections between people IRL and what allows for them to occur over the internet? To what extent do these relationships encourage the video game "addictions" mentioned in the paragraph above?
Moving in a different direction, does WoW encourage valuable life skills? Should we promote this type of collaborative gaming in schools (a parallel with the old school game Oregon Trail springs to mind here). In Jenkins (page 4) there is a list of important abilities to acquire in this new participatory culture and a number of them seem potentially applicable to my topic. For example:
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
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