Promoting Cross-Cultural Interaction in Games

Spring Break ’10 is already here, hard to believe I know, but time flies when *you’re having fun,* however that may be!  Anyway, I have been thinking about how to approach the WRI for the rest of the semester (in order to fulfill the class credits!).  I have been researching on Jstor articles and studies on the effectiveness of video games on education.

I was surprised by the initial JStor results.

At first, I was expecting to find and begin reading testimonies for and against the usage of video games for education, which I did find.  But what was unusual were the articles that referenced the effectiveness for games to be used in the professional setting to teach skills or train professionals in areas that they should already know.  From this, I am beginning to draw my initial hypothesis that games for education are not only helpful in adolescent primary education, but also in the professional workforce.

Maybe this is due to the privacy of video games.

In some cases, these video games teach basic skills such as reading and leadership.  Reading being the fundamental foundation and leadership being the specialty skill that not everybody in society needs, but perhaps many search for.  In a world when we are expected to perform, what if somebody really cannot?  This could be due to their past education or simple inability to remember material, and these are obviously not the only causes or are maybe not the causes at all, but let’s speculate.  Assuming a professional needs to relearn certain skills, what better than to learn through a video game, either on their own time, or in private, or in a limited access setting.  Could these senses of individuality and anonymity aid in the effectiveness of learning?

Many gamers report that deep friend connections are made through the internet, sometimes because when the gamer is not chatting “face to face” but through the computer, they are more open, especially because societal norms, stereotypes, etc are not evident in this form of communication.  Perhaps this will foster a better learning environment for future learners.

I think my research must dive into questioning the learning environment, and before I can understand the studies on video games, background knowledge on the learning environment might prove imperative for the rest of the semester’s study.

Over spring break I plan to kick back and enjoy the R&R… hopefully play some MMOs but definitely I’ll be finding answers and creating more questions–

Spring Break ’10 — JSTOR take your shirt off!! Woohoo