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With educators finally embracing electronic games as a legitimate context for learning, there are a lot of questions and some debate about how to situate games in school. In addition to figuring out the place of gaming in school, I’m interested in exploring the ways gaming and gamers transgress the limitations of institutional/formal learning and what we can learn from authentic gaming cultures and contexts outside of school – as a key to learning with games but also the very future of education.

What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience.

Games give their players meaningful choices that meaningfully impact on the world of the game.

They are the least important bit of a game, the bit that has the least to do with all of the rich cognitive, emotional and social drivers which gamifiers are intending to connect with.

For a growing group of educators, the online role-playing game World of Warcraft is a place to go to relax, network, and discover potential learning strategies-- and slay a few monsters if they get in the way.

"Does anyone know where to find best practices for a unit on reptiles?"

Vyktorea herself belongs to Catherine Parsons, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and pupil personnel services for Pine Plains Central School District in New York state. Parsons is the founder of this "guild"-- a community of game players with a shared interest. Called Cognitive Dissonance and populated entirely by educators from both K-12 and higher education, it meets regularly in WoW's elaborate, monster-laden fantasy adventure world, where members play, share ideas, and explore possible instructional crossover. Parsons created the guild two years ago and now runs it with help from Sandy Wagner, director of technology for New York's Auburn Enlarged City School District.