The Teaching Game

 

Seeing beyond the hype

In the end the debate around Second Life, and how like a game it is, may well be superceded by events. The increasing use of SL by many physical world commercial enterprises for serious business ends coupled with the growing recognition of the validity of digital games as serious learning environments ^[23] could lead to the disarming of arguments against the funding of the educational use of games and Second Life in particular. Certainly SL has achieved a level of coverage in the mass media that far surpasses all other MMORPGs. It is likely rather, that its efficacy, for any number of applications, will be judged by what it is seen being used for under the glare of the media’s spotlight. In this context the immediate problem may well be overcoming public perceptions of Second Life as a haven for pornography and gambling much in the way the web used to be viewed.

It also remains to be seen how Second Life will survive the “Technology Hype Cycle” ^[24] that, Gartner technology analysts predict, is the course that all new technologies must traverse before they achieve ubiquitous utility. Using the terminology of the hype cycle ^[25] it’s easy to speculate that Second Life is at or near its “peak of inflated expectations” with the inevitable “trough of disillusionment” lying ahead. If Second Life or a similar virtual world establishes its value then we can look forward to the “slope of enlightenment” and the final “plateau of productivity”.

It does not take a great leap of the imagination to see a parallel course being taken by the educational uses of Second Life - perhaps a little behind the hype but charting a very similar trajectory.

 

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