The WoW experience: grounding a graduate English seminar

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the World of Warcraft (WoW) experience, where students in a graduate English seminar played WoW to ground their learning about digital literacies. Through the experience, students developed their own digital literacies and learned to enter academic discourse about games and digital literacies. Design/methodology/approach – In the paper, the instructor and eight students describe the purpose, design and outcomes of the experience. Over the course of a month, the group coordinated logistics and roles, each person created a character, each character reached the threshold level for low-level dungeons, the whole class played several dungeons together and the class engaged in metaconversation about the experience. Findings – The instructor reflects on the problem of practice that the WoW experience addressed and the instructional organization of the experience. The students, who came into the WoW experience with a range of prior knowledge about games and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, reflect on what challenges they faced while learning to play and develop their own digital literacies, how they assembled resources to overcome challenges, how their views of digital literacies and games shifted from the experience and how the experience helped them rethink teaching first-year composition. Originality/value – As the WoW experience illustrates, finding ways to connect games to advanced graduate courses can create fun, frustration and powerful learning experiences for students as they maneuver complex content.