The intellectual life of online play

The past three decades of cognitive research has well documented that play is an important context for learning for younger children, but we have a harder time accepting that it is equally important for teenagers and adults. Digital worlds for play such as those found in massively multiplayer online games (so called "virtual worlds") offer compelling, naturally occurring models of the online learning environments educators have been diligently attempting to craft in the basements of their ivory towers (with somewhat limited success). This disparity gives rise to a deep irony: American schools, designed for intentionally learning, remain locked within a Ford type factory model of industry and efficiency; games, on the other hand, with no intention to teach or education, lean forward rather than backward, recruiting intellectual practices, dispositions, and forms of social organization that are well aligned with many of todays "new capitalist" workplaces.