neither the first notion of the culture of learning (finding information) nor the second (practice, play, experience, and creating new knowledge constantly) accounts for the leap from complete failure to easy success. Something clicked for the guild, something that had not been there before
once that shift happens, players find that it can happen again, and eventually it even becomes commonplace.
Questing is an activity that is central to most large-scale online games, and it presumes a number of things. Chief among them is that the world provides multiple resources and avenues for solving problems, and solutions are invented as much as they are implemented. The key to questing is not typical problem solving. It is innovation.
What begins as experimentation is replicated, tested, and incorporated into the stockpile of information that constitutes the knowledge economy surrounding the game.
This type of innovation is also a fusion of the two elements of learning, a pulling together of resources and experimenting with them to see what fits.
From the perspective of learning, battling monsters and collecting treasure are the least interesting things going on in, and particularly around, games such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online.
This theory is a good step forward, but what fails to make the piece concrete as opposed to some abstract paper on the principles of collective learning alone, is a lack of examples.