Playing the Course

Playing the Course: Game Emergence and Online Learning Communities
By Jim Kiggens
California Virtual Campus, Professional Development Center

As educators in the online environment, we work to promote the development of virtual learning communities that will engage learners. But, ultimately it is the learners who determine whether a virtual learning community emerges.

In the arena of online multiplayer game design, developers endeavor to design games that will also promote the emergence of a virtual community. Game developers design to incorporate emergent properties in their games to enhance the user experience. Multiplayer online games facilitate chance encounters, collective recreational activities and spontaneous social interaction.

Emergent interaction varies the user experience depending upon group dynamics, therefore, prolonging social participation. In this way, emergence creates a game that is more engaging and the resulting virtual learning community engages the player to persist in playing the game on an ongoing basis.

Digital game based learning associations and initiatives are highlighting the new opportunity available to educators today in incorporating the intrinsically motivating environments of multiplayer online games to promote emergent virtual learning communities where the learner develops his or her own understanding through a social process of experience, practice and participation.