Writing in MMORGs

Ok, fourth short post of the day:

I was struck in a few of the articles (I've read all but the Anderson/Balsamo at this point) by how much writing goes on between gamers, particularly the "beekeepers" in I Love Bees.  This was brought out in the CCCC session I attended (see post below).  Presenter Joanna Phillips uses the World of Warcraft fan site thottbot.com to discuss rhetorical appeals with her first-year composition students:  Rather than learning to write just for a paper, she argued that gaming and game-related websites can help students transfer their writing and analysis skills to new environments.  She asks her students questions like, "What can we learn from the writing activities in a World of Warcraft fan site?  How do participants use ethos, pathos, and logos to acquire leadership in this arena?  In your environments (including Facebook and MySpace, as well as physical ones), how do people use these types of appeals?  What are the implications?"  Another presenter, Christopher Ritter, discussed the amount of writing that goes into the actual play of WoW, especially at advanced levels when gamers must constantly communicate with each other to complete a mission.  (The panel ended, by the way, with an amazing virtual presentation put together the day before by a member who was kept from the conference by a sudden family emergency; he used several different avatars to "speak" for him, along with charts, screen captures, etc.  It was really impressive.)

As we know, our students are already writing in these types of online environments (as well as, of course, blogs and emails and text messages).  Can/should we attempt to tap into this writing, to co-opt it for pedagogical use?  Or perhaps it would be better to ask, can/should we tap into the exigence that motivates the writing they already do?  Obviously, my students are more interested in writing on each other's "walls" and chatting in WoW than writing their research paper for my class.  But isn't that only natural?  Of course we're more motivated by and interested in our social, voluntary uses of literacy than in the literacies we're forced to practice in school.  I think it's ok for school to be school.  And yet, there's got to be something we can do to help students be more engaged in the work of school, or to help school be more engaged in the work of students.