World of Warcraft and Libraries' Mission

While I drove home with a friend from a wedding in Evansville, talk centered on technology, reading and children. My friend, Joan, is a special ed teacher and mother of two in their twenties. Her daughter just got a job as a librarian in Edmonton, Canada. She and her husband are computer literate and use computers on a daily basis at work and at home as an educational, artistic, organizational and communicative tool.

So I was surprised when I asked her if she’d ever heard of Second Life and/or World of Warcraft, and she said no. I told her that WoW is a medieval online game with wizards, trolls, and warriors where players act out their fantasies in battle. She didn’t like the name or the violent nature of the game. I told her about Second Life and its avatars, and how two friends got into an argument over the selling of one’s avatar by the other on e-bay for over $1000. I told her that the avatar’s creator got so mad over the sale and over the seller’s refusal to share the profit that he murdered him, really, in real life. She was stunned. She expressed concern about youth’s apparent need to escape this world for a virtual one. She asked me if children really were playing this game, and I said that I thought they were in large numbers, esp. teens. I said that teens played it a lot on library computers. She asked me if I considered that fulfilling the library’s mission. That was a stumper.

On one hand, I want with all my being to shield children from these games, just as I want to shield them from real violence and war. It seems to me, though, that teens who play WoW and Second Life are not escaping this world but actually safely mimicking it and exploring it virtually to see how well they navigate their way in it. Why should it surprise us that children choose to fight virtually when news and consequences of real warfare surround them? For many, war is panting at the finish line of 12th grade. If I were a young adult, I would be thinking a lot about how I would perform in the face of violence, be it in Iraq or at school. I know my teens did when Columbine happened. Since 2003 I have watched the Greencastle armory marquis promise to a new recruit, first, $1000, and then $10,000, and today, $60,000! If I were a young adult male, I would surely want to know if I had what it takes to be a “real” man – i.e., as defined by our culture, to fight in battle to victory. At least, in WoW and Second Life, the fighting is virtual, and destroyed avatars can be resurrected. In real life, children are baited with bribes to commit the greatest sin – war. And they do it because they see it as a way to gain societal rewards of respect, money, glory and honor. Even more, they hope to find camaraderie in the military, as I’m sure they do online in WoW.

So, although I could not answer Joan when she posed the question about whether allowing patrons to play WoW fulfilled the library’s mission, I would say now that it does fulfill its mission. It does so because it is facilitating lifelong learning. The fact that children are using library computers to learn how to conduct oneself in battle is a sad commentary on America’s dreams for its children. Children feel the need to immerse themselves in virtual violence as a way to prepare for what’s fast approaching --society’s expectation that they will sacrifice themselves to it in reality.