Stepping Out of the Classroom Into Virtuality: Using MMORPGs to Teach History

A major problem for teaching history is the difficulty of getting students interested in the materials and making sense of the coherent narrative of historical events presented in class. Through lectures, discussions, assignments, films, and reading materials, instructors try to demonstrate a thematic order to their subjects, but many find that students struggle to make sense ofthe material or to restructure it into a clear historical narrative at the end of the semester. Even when they do make sense of the narrative, students often fail to see the value of the subjects they studied. In many ways, the problem for historians is effectively enabling students to understand the relationship between the day-to-day existence of people and the sweeping historical events occurring in the past as well as those during the students' own lifetimes. This problem leads to an important question for the teaching profession: Can nontraditional methods like using video games in the classroom aid in teaching history and possibly even create an active learning environment? A growing body of experience and literature suggests that video games can be used as effective teaching tools for history, depending on how they are employed. 1 Beyond offering students a new way to learn about the past, video games give them an opportunity to come into direct contact with history by allowing them to actively participate in a re-creation of historical events. For the past six years, I have allowed my students in upper division history courses (usually twenty to twenty-five students) the opportunity to play video games as part of the selection of class assignments offered to them. The others are more traditional assignments used in history courses: film reviews, argumentative essays based on reading materials, and a short research paper