Compromising among Gaming, Learning and Society

Ruhui Ni · Mete Akcaoglu · Ken Dirkin

Fri., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Tripp Commons (Center)

Zon, built by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University, is an MMORPG designed to support Chinese language learning and culture education. The features and educative values of MMORPGs have been considered of great significance to foreign language learning (Zhao & Lai, 2008). Since its inception, Zon designers have been trying to follow and apply the design principles suggested by the research community.

Although in various aspects and levels, Zon have combined many powerful language-learning tools into a coherent platform and shown huge potential that could benefit Chinese language learning, as all kinds of serious/educative/learning games, especially the MMORPGs, the conflict between gaming, learning and community has also maintained as a big challenge for Zon. When the designers are excited for the strength of MMORPG that could enable an interactive compute-mediated environment and could provide sufficient learning content, materials, and resources, the design and development was once unbalanced focused on flooding the language and culture content in Zon environment. The gaming aspect of Zon, which contains motivational power by which the game could attract and sustain players in Zon was neglected to some degree. In return, the learning content had not been of much use. The third aspect of this balance issue is the community, which is a virtual society of China embedded in Zon. The social community provided by an MMORPG could also serve for both gaming and learning purpose. Thus the design of functionalities of communication tools in Zon needs to consider when players use them only for making friends and socialize without much interest in language learning, as well as when the tools are specifically used for learning-targeted conversation among players, and between players and provided language tutors. Along with the evolution of Zon world, there have been many repetitions that the equilibrium of this virtual world were broken and then be reached again through balancing the learning, gaming and community.

In this paper, we will talk about the path that Zon has been through in the past two and half years. We will also discuss the specific challenges we’ve had and how we had coped with the difficulties in the process of adjusting and compromising among three key components—learning, gaming and community of this MMORPG. Furthermore, we would like to demo the updated Zon and to share our mid-term and long-term development agenda to seek advice and suggestions from GLS community.

References

Zhao, Y. & Lai, C. (2008). Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS) And Foreign Language Education. In Ferdig, R. (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education. New York: IDEA Group.