Following our description of the first two quests World of Warcraft players are given, it may be interesting to look at the increasing fighting demands on the player, which are, among other things, at the core of his learning in the game. In particular, it is an example of the Ongoing learning Principle (Gee 2003, p. 71). Similar comparisons could perhaps be made with other types of quests but focusing on fighting skills is easier for me due to my small experience playing it.

1. Initially, using only one technique is fine: the standard Mage spell is enough to overcome basic enemies. As we previously said, this enables the player to master his skills through practice.

2. After looking at the book of spells and techniques, my attention was taken by a spell that had less destructive power than the one I was commonly using but which particularity was to slow opponents' run for 5 seconds. It made me able to refine my fighting skills in order to optimise my life points: by using that spell twice or three times at the beginning of an attack, I could save more life points for the rest of the fight (possibly at the expense of a slightly higher loss of mana).

Therefore, I could overcome stronger opponents.

Again, I routinized that strategy from about level 3 through level 9 (Practice principle - Gee 2003), knowing some undoing of that mastery would be on order some time later.

3. At level 9, one of my quests took me to the Gol' Bolar quarry, which adds another constraint: it's full of enemies who attack as soon as they see you and whose social characteristic means they'll help each other out. In addition to that, there's only one entrance/exit to the quarry so when you're in trouble, it's almost impossible to escape (due to the fact it forces you to pass by other creatures who will help your opponent). So, again, unless the player doesn't mind losing time finding his/her body (that's what you do when you die), he/she needs to take into account the specificities of the terrain to hide appropriately and attack isolated creatures only - I remember a similar instance of distributed knowledge or "Material intelligence" (Gee 2003, pp. 109-110) at the beginning of the game where you realise it's safer to follow roads than run through hills where there are many wolves, etc.). It adds another tactical elements to the approach.

Now, another such quest in that same quarry involves killing a number of social creatures who happen to appear only once in a while (I haven't figured out why and when yet) and in very united groups. That latter characteristics makes it impossible to attack them individually. I'm quite happy about that because it's been a while since I've wanted to assess the social aspect of the game: in the next few days or weeks, my goal is to have other players to join me in an attempt to solve quests collaboratively. I'm convinced this will help me learn much more than I have so far (which is already more than I expected).

References:

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

World of Warcraft (2009). MMORPG game. Blizzard Entertainment.