MMORPGs

I found this post recently.  It’s an interview with a homeschooling mom who plays World of Warcraft with her sons.  As expected, the comments that follow range from supportive to nasty. 

I’ve recently gone back to playing Star Wars Galaxies, a MMORPG game similar to World of Warcraft.  My character is tailor so I spend a great deal of my time doing market research, thinking up new marketing strategies, dealing with customers, stocking vendors and calculating ways to increase my profit margin.

Playing as a homeschooling mom now, I find myself thinking about all the lessons that could be taught in this microcosm. Everything from economics to sociology concepts are represented.  Unlike most games where you simply have to figure out the rules or programming the software plays by, you’re dealing with real live humans who don’t always act in ways you’d expect. That adds challenge and interest to the game.

But it also adds safety issues.  Just like in real life, there are bad folks out there and I think it’s with good reason that games like these are rated for teens.  As much as they’d love to play and there’s so many good lessons there for them, I don’t think my 9 year olds are mature enough to handle meeting an unscrupulous person alone.

So for now we’re keeping them out of these types of games. At least until they’re old enough to pay the monthly fee for themselves