What is World of Warcraft?

I don't know how many of you know this but on Tuesday night World of Warcraft released their expansion pack called the Burning Crusade. I went to the release party for this game and was, well, horrified. I myself do not play World of Warcraft but my husband and his friends are avid players. On this particular night he wanted company to get his expansion pack at midnight from the Cornwall center. I obliged and went with him to the line of many university aged men (some women) waiting impatiently for their copy of the game. I felt very out of place at this "convention" of "gamers." I'm sure they could all tell by the look on my face that I was a skeptic and did not believe in their gaming ways.

Now, for many of you World of Warcraft (WOW) might be a mystery, but I advise you to make yourselves aware of it as it will most likely affect you as a person or you as a teacher at some point in you life. WOW is a "massive multiple online role playing game" or "mmo rpg" or as I like to call it a "video game played online with lots of people." WOW allows for the creation of individualized characters that interact with each other and also for players to interact with other players. This type of social networking is not unlike MSN or Yahoo! Chat but to me it seems far more addictive.

The addictive part to WOW is that players make friendships within the game and can verbally talk to others anywhere in the world. Players can also become completely different from who they really are; you can go from a nobody to a very powerful somebody in a matter of days. WOW is a world of its own with multiple continents, cities, races. Players can develop strategies to improve their characters, prior to this week characters were allowed to achieve a level of 60 and now can achieve level 70. One of the scary features of WOW is that it has no end, a player must finish their quests or battles before signing off (this applies to all members who do not want to be blacklisted for lack of participation and teamwork). Also the world within the game is forever changing and being updated so that players never get bored.

Although I am biased against WOW there are pros to playing the game as well:

Pros of WOW:
Social networking and peer acceptance
Learn strategies
Teamwork
Entertaining
Always changing
Able to become someone different with super human abilities


Unfortunately where there are pros, there must be cons:
Cons of WOW:
Obliged to complete what is started (massive time commitment)
Expensive
Addictive because of social networking/entertainment and peer acceptance
One will not have time for friends or family not involved in WOW
Poor customer service
Often freezes or crashes

How does WOW involve me?

WOW is, as I have said, addictive and many people are involved with it. I feel that it is just a matter of time before this mmo trickles down into the hands of middle years and secondary students. My worry is that these students will get caught up in the perks of the game and forget about extra-curricular activities, friends, homework, and sleep. I have seen all of these things happen to multiple people who play this game at the university level including my husband.

My point to this article is that we as educators really need to do is teach our students to think critically about the pros and cons of the activities that they chose to participate in. World of Warcraft, for example, is entertaining and social but it does need to be the only thing that students participate in. The same goes for MSN, MySpace, and any other social spaces.

Here is a clip of the new expansion to WOW: