The play of imagination
extending the literary mind
pp. 99-120
in: , After cognitivism, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
In the past decade, beginning with Ultima Online, a new genre of interactive play has emerged in the form of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).1For recent analysis of the scope and impact of MMOGs see Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, Chicago UP, 2005, T.L Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, and Julian Dibbell, Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, New York: Basic Books, 2006. These games combine the power of traditional forms of roleplaying games with a rich, textured graphical framework. The result has been the emergence of game spaces which provide players with new and unusual opportunities for learning.2 As these games become increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways, where players have become deeply enmeshed in the practices and cultures of interactive play, collaboration, and learning. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in these spaces is fundamentally different from the learning experiences associated with standard pedagogical practice. In this paper, we examine how this new world of games has captured the imagination and how the play of imagination that it engenders yield insights into the way play, innovation, and learning are connecting for the 21st century.