Learning from computer games: literacy learning in a virtual world

Abstract

This chapter builds on James Gee’s (2003) description of the playing of computer games as the learning of a new literacy. To investigate this form of literacy learning from a player’s perspective, the author created an avatar and joined the online community of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game, the World of WarcraftTM produced by Blizzard Entertainment® (2004a). This autoethnographic approach to exploring the game’s linguistic, visual, audio, spatial and gestural elements of design provide an insider’s perspective of the meaning-making resources that were on offer. The chapter concludes with a tentative consideration of how understandings about the literacies used within a virtual world might inform the learning of literacies in schools and other educational institutions.