Roughly half the class opted for WoW. We were a little too large to form a group, which made some tasks a little more complicated than others. Since I didn't have the courage to ask the college to host a TeamSpeak server, we ended up using Skype. For each session, everyone would meet at a designated spot in world. Then we'd read some quests together and set out.
The gameplay itself was frequently chaotic. Imagine your usual conversations in WoW, take away the group functions and limit everyone's vocabulary to that of a 3-year-old, and you get the idea.
But despite the chaos, there were real benefits that came from using the game. In addition to the extra hour of speaking and reading in German each week, the students created a cheat sheet on their own of over 100 words they thought they'd need for future sessions. They were instant experts on the command tense. They devoured the list of verbs for the emotes, and roughly half of them played the game on their own for a couple of hours each week.
Despite the extra work, I considered the game a success. The ability to immerse students in a situation made the game unique. Communicating in German became a skill they needed to succeed. Their concentration for that hour in WoW was absolute, and they were willing to spend extra time outside of class as well. It was every teacher's dream.
Flush with success, I started looking around for other games that could provide the same benefits in other courses. History and political science seemed like the most likely candidates. By the following semester, I had enough games for a faculty workshop. I came prepared to show several games including Rome: Total War, the mod Rome Total Realism, Civ IV, A Force More Powerful and PeaceMaker.
Unfortunately, after 15 minutes of waiting, I was still the only one to show up. I was getting ready to go home when a new political science professor arrived. He didn't even need to hear the sales pitch. He was already active in severally politically oriented online games that I hadn't heard of, including Cyber Nations and NationStates, and he was eager to discuss ways to use games in his classes.
Since then, we've offered five or six courses each semester that integrate games in some way. PeaceMaker is the most popular, but we've also used Die Gilde 2, Civ IV, Fold It and some games on the Japanese Wii. This semester, we had students create their own games for the first time as well using Inform 7.
I'll usually see a couple students during the day playing a game in one of the labs. Most come in the evenings after I've left for home. Some play just for fun, others as one of their assignments. The best part is I can't tell.
Last week I heard a student complain that my Civ IV mod was impossible. "It's possible," I said. "If you want to win, you should take the course on empires."
Todd Bryant is the Instructional Media Liaison for the foreign language departments at Dickinson College. You can read his blog at linux.dickinson.edu/wpmu/languages.
