Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming as a Constellation of Literacy Practices

TLDR

Claims that video games replace literacy stem from vague definitions and a lack of research on children’s actual gaming activities. The article investigates the literacy practices embedded in massively multiplayer online games. The author surveys MMOG players’ literacy activities both inside the game—such as social interaction and in‑game letters—and outside it—like online forums, fan sites, and fan fiction. The study concludes that MMOG gameplay constitutes literacy activities rather than displacing them.

Abstract

The claim that video games are replacing literacy activities that is bandied about in the American mainstream press is based not only on unspecified definitions of both ‘games' and ‘literacy’ but also on a surprising lack of research on what children actually do when they play video games. In this article, the author examines some of the practices that comprise game play in the context of one genre of video games in particular — massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Based on data culled from a two-year online cognitive ethnography of the MMOG Lineage (both I and II), the author argues that forms of video game play such as those entailed in MMOGs are not replacing literacy activities but rather are literacy activities. In order to make this argument, the author surveys the literacy practices that MMOGamers routinely participate in, both within the game's virtual world (e.g. social interaction, in-game letters) and beyond (e.g. online game forums, the creation of fan sites and fan fiction). Then, with this argument in place, she attempts to historicize this popular contempt toward electronic ‘pop culture’ media such as video games and suggest a potentially more productive (and accurate) framing of the literacy practices of today's generation of adolescents and young adults.