Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming as a Constellation of Literacy Practices

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. Based on media coverage, one would think that the United States were in a modern-day literacy crisis, thanks particularly to new digital technologies such as video games. Recent publications include books with titles such as A is for Ox: the collapse of literacy and the rise of violence in the electronic age (Sanders, 1995).(1) Survey experts report that video games are now 'the fourth most dominant medium, displacing print media' (Mandese, 2004). Meanwhile, news reports quote researchers as stating, 'students will be doing more and more bad things if they are playing games and not doing other things like reading aloud' (Wearden, 2001, emphasis added).(2) This concern about video games somehow replacing literacy activities is perhaps best summed up in a recent New York Times editorial by Solomon (2004), who states that electronic activities - video games given as the quintessential example - are 'torpid', 'by and large invite inert reception', and are one of the primary causes behind the 'closing of the American book' (Weber, 2004). Yet, all the while, video gaming is only becoming more and more ubiquitous in contemporary American youth culture, with more than eight out of every ten children in America having a video game console in the home, and over half having two or more (Rideout et al, 2005). Based on claims such as these, one might indeed feel cause for alarm. There are two problems, however, with such arguments. The first is a lack of specificity about the 'cause' of the purported problem. While video games are often singled out as a (if not the) primary technological culprit of the supposed 'literacy crisis', which games are being referred to is left chronically underspecified. Even when we ignore, for sake of argument, the fact that games are, by definition, a thoroughly interactive medium and are therefore taken up in dramatically different ways by different people, we are still left with the problem of their diversity in design. Games vary wildly in nature, including such diverse forms as: arcade games (e.g. PacMan), first-