Lest you think playing WoW is nothing but trouble (and shame on you if you do), Terra Nova has an excellent story about how WoW is being used in a therapetic setting.It's great to hear that Blizzard's little game could actually be the key to helping young kids out "socially, academically, and therapeutically." The social benefits are obvious-- even the shyest wallflower can get involved, meet people, and find a group in WoW (it's no substitute for the real thing, as the article says, but it's a step up from no social interaction at all). And it's true that with all the numbers and text in WoW, it's not surprising that figuring those out could translate to better academic work in some cases. If you don't care about aggro, you might not benefit, but if a kid really cares about how to max his DPS or make sure he keeps aggro on the main tank, there's some good number theory going on there. And we've already shown, here on this site, that there's a bias against bad spelling ingame.
But perhaps most interesting is how the shared experience of WoW can be used to build connections to kids who have trouble making connections at all. We're a culture, for sure, because we all know why they call it Lagforge, and we all know (well, eventually we do) where Mankrik's wife is. It's awesome that a therapist can use that connection to create some more real connections, as the story says, between the child and the teacher.
Now let's just see if the media covers a story like this. Or hasn't the suicide in China gotten enough press yet?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-10-2006 @ 1:40AM
Aaron said...
I don't know about the Therapy aspect.
I do know that my younger brother basically learned to type at 14 because of DAoC though. And in WoW he was mistaken for being older than he was because of the fact that his spelling and grammer were more like an 18 year old than a 14 year old.
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10-10-2006 @ 4:02PM
BigDan said...
I make most of my strong connections RL side by talking to people about WoW. (I used to be very introduction-shy.)
Now I just walk up to someone and say "guess what..
My Tauren Shaman dinged 31 last night!"
If they don't look at me like a crazy man I know they know.. You know?
If they do I just explain to them all about the game if they will listen and I have brought back two people and converted one from sports to a huge wow geek. (Free months Blizz?) Anyways.
Thats my story of how WoW brought me most of the way out of my shell!
PS Definitely therapeutic(spelling?).
I love coming home after a long day of working and just killing some stuff and talking to guildies (we are a very relaxed guild thinking of PvP and raids later on) for a while before going to bed. Anyone reading it also teaches resource management and marketing(for those future and current ebayers out there). So look out! Blizz is trying to force you to get prepared for the real world.(of course by real world I mean the one that the majority of people accept as the one in which we generally live.)
So yeah; I used to be shy!
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