MMORPG Academy

The idea for this project takes everything that makes a MMORPG addictive and turn it into learning.

Many people learn best by critically interacting with what they are learning. As a result, all learning would be interactive. Your “student” would be a character similar to the characters on World of Warcraft. You could progress through any subject you like–math, history, Japanese, whatever–and your “class” would be akin to a major. If you wanted to, you could have as many majors as you like by creating multiple characters or double/triple majoring.

Each subject would have its own world, so instead of merely going into a virtual room and learning about history, you would go to a virtual Rome when learning about the Roman empire or the Latin language. The setting of the game should be science-fictional, so you can simply have teleporters that work as folders–one teleporter takes you to the history department, which takes you to learning about Rome, etc. If you’ve played Phantasy Star Online, imagine their lobby system: teleporters make it easy for anyone to integrate worlds into the setting without being terribly out of context.

Sure, some courses would be very difficult to integrate into the game. It’s unlikely that you would immediately see an expansive course for learning the piano without extensive development, but the point is that there are many subjects, including most of those in traditional education, of which a game like this would assist learning. For that reason alone, I think it would be a very valuable tool.

To make it expandable so that a school, university or other organization could fund its own virtual courses, the project should be open source. There’s a lack of good games on Linux systems as it is, and having the game available for free on Ubuntu would encourage free and open knowledge for everyone, instead of restricting it to those who can afford it.