Week 8 Thu Ngo

As someone who loves video games and mmorpgs, the Steinkuehler reading was a very exciting and motivating read. The parallels it drew between players collaborating and contributing knowledge towards the scientific community contributing to “collective intelligence” is something that I never would have considered. This leads to me a few questions.

The first is if this same analysis can be done for fan-fiction website where super heroes/villains are pitted against each other in battles. In these battles two characters from different comic series (think Spiderman vs Superman) are placed in a situation where they are to fight. A lot of the discussion I’ve seen regarding these fights include aspects that the study highlighted such as “argument, counterargument, and the use of evidence to warrant one’s claims.”

The second question is if games can be made to improve science literacy. The reason why I ask this question is because the players are passionate about the world and systems that they discuss in World of Warcraft, whereas a game meant to purely encourage science literacy might not illicit the same passion and thus provoke the same discussion.