Game Based Learning: Dogwood Trail

Prompt:

Sociology
     It was hard to leave the Field of Daisies, but you feel you have a duty to explore this Dogwood Trail further. It seemed like you had traveled only a little further before you saw quite a site to behold -- a 1,000 year old Ebony Tree!

Ebony Tree: 

Strong Social Connectivity from Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

Stronger Social Connectivity

• Applications in conjunction with social media sites such as Facebook allow users to keep in touch with family and friends across the world. 
• The game mentioned in McGonigal's book was Lexulous-a scrabble like game equipped with chat. 
• For a while, I played Words with Friend, similar to both Scrabble and Lexulous. It allowed me to connect with family and friends that were at home in Pennsylvania while I am in school in Tennessee. 
• Applications in conjunction with social media sites such as MySpace Facebook also allow users to meet new people and make new friends. 
• Lexulous was designed so that users could create "random" games and battle opponents they may not know. 
• I remember, back when I had a MySpace page, that I began adding people that played the same gardening game that I played so that we could send each other time or seeds or whatever other needs we had. 
• Asynchronous Game-play
• Players do not have to be online at the same time to continue a game.  This allows people to be flexible and play whenever they are free or between appointments. 
• This is the key factor to the addictiveness of games such as Lexulous, Words with Friends, Trivia Crack and so on.

Happy Embarrassment 

• Every type of game comes with some type of banter. 
• Players taunt one another to brag about their win or high score and to encourage one the other player to be better. 
• This last part, encourage the other player to be better.  It doesn't seem like banter would be able to do this, but as we taunt our opponents it drives them to beat us.  This would go back to the fun in failure that I wrote about in my last post. 
• Excitement in these social games has even created a new lingo. 
• Pwned, often pronounced poned or pawned, derived from the misspelling of owned in phrases like, "I just owned that game."  I included this under the happy embarrassment section because it is slightly an embarrassment to the intelligence of gamers.  They misspell a word so often that they have created a clip of the word owned.

Vicarious Pride

• Naches
• This Yiddish term means bursting with pride.  Many gamers say they experience this type of euphoria when they have taught or mentored has succeeded.  Players that report this feeling often experience this euphoria when they are coaching someone at a game and the player gets closer to or completes their mission. 
• Mentoring our friends and family makes us happy and brings us closer together. 
• The happiness we receive when we cheer on our family and friends demonstrates our desire to invest in other people's growth and achievement. 
• On the other side of the scale, if we are not actively helping someone achieve their goal, we often feel jealousy or resentment.  
• Our lack of participation in their success is visible through the lack of pride shown in our emotional systems. 

Ambient Sociability

• Sometimes company is better from a different room. 
• Massive multiplayer online games allow people to communicate (via chart or headphone/speaker devices) and work toward a common goal from different rooms (or houses or states or countries).  Many players, however, have reported that they prefer to play these games alone. 
• Researchers have found that players enjoy playing video games side by side. 
• They may or may not be playing the same game, but they are likely not playing the game together.  This ambient sociability is the sensation of sharing the same space with one another.