Anniversaries

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, it’s time to celebrate the two year anniversary of Learning by Gaming and the one year anniversary of my weekly article series „Finding of the week“.

About one week ago on March 12th was the second anniversary of Learning by Gaming. Unbelieveable, that it’s been already two years since I launched my personnal science and research website. So many things happened during this time.

2 year anniversary

On the one hand, I experienced the process of writing and publishing a paper. It started with the first concept of it and ended with a short presentation on a conference[1]. Additionally, I was able to make some progress and developed a concept for a research project over the second half of the passed last year. Currently, this research project is on a good way to be realized. A first prototype exists already and the project attracted two students, who like to design and program it as their bachelor thesis.

Finally, the last year was also the first year of my weekly „Finding of the week“ article series. Today’s article is also about the celebration of the first anniversary of the Fotw series, because the first article was published on March 23rd. This means nothing else than that there was one short article released per week about a certain gaming related topic. I can’t believe, that it’s been already a year since I started writing those articles.

In celebration of these two anniversaries, I like to go back a bit in time and share with you maybe one of the key moments, that really started my interest in the research of computer games with a special focus on the social and educational aspects.

It was around the release of Diablo 2 and my first attempts of playing this game online. The most interesting thing for me around this time was the chance of getting in contact with people from all over the world. Players could open up game sessions and if these games weren’t protected by a password, everyone could join these sessions and play together with all the other players in this particular game. Moreover, there was no real separation between countries–players could join games independently from their origin. Naturally, this often caused some issues due to the language barriers between the players. However, as long as everyone was writing in English, it was possible to play together with people from all over the world.

During these early days, I ended up playing one sunday morning together with a player from Spain. We began to chitchat a bit, exchanged later on our e-mail adresses and finally we became penpals. Unfortunately, this lasted only a few weeks, but it was a very interesting experience to become a penpal with someone from another country just by playing a computer game.
In today’s gaming community with World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs available, it’s nothing special anymore to become friends with other players. However, back in these days, it was completely new to me.

The above described experience was mostly so special to me, because it was the first time that I really stayed in contact with a player from a different country. However, there were a lot of other contacts and friendships I’ve made during this time and to some degree, it was a feeling of being connected to players from all over the world by just playing one game.

Since these early experiences with Diablo 2, I came to the result, that games can do so much more than just entertain us. Now, about 14 years later, I’m hopefully able to proof some of these initial thoughts in my profession as a Ph.D student.