This is my first year of schooling where I really feel my schoolwork cutting into my gaming time. I've just started taking the International Baccalaureate program (IB) and well, I have my work cut out for me. Normally under any other circumstances, I would be saying, "OMG IB SUCKS! How am I supposed to get my Tauren Warrior to 70 now?! How can I play my Madden Franchise?" Well, IB isn't what I would call normal circumstances. I've found it to be a lot more refreshingly abstract then previous courses and although it is true my WoW time has been cut significantly, school has given me some new outlets to unleash my gaming-related fury. And this doesn't mean I'm starting to play more casual games (although casual games are very awesome, Zuma is quite possibly a masterpiece, and I guess if you want to call Puzzle Quest a casual game, well, you know how awesome that game is too), what it means is that I have now found myself using video games as part of my schoolwork.

I take a Junior Seminar course now; basically we learn about morality, what it is, and how religions see it through a number of different topics. We were told by the teacher that our essay would be on a moral issue, and we would need to discuss some of the different viewpoints, and then defend one. What he then told us was that we had to choose the topic ourselves. Of course, the easy ideas popped into my mind; divorce, abortion, all that good stuff. Later that day, I found myself playing a little Counter-Strike on my laptop on the bus home. That's when it hit me; I was going to talk about video games and morality. Two days later after some initial research, I pitched the topic to my teacher and he accepted it. Maybe once I'm done with that I'll post the essay up here, in all its 1500-3000 words glory.

A few days later, we were assigned to create a commentary for Economics on supply and demand. You had to find an article, discuss the applications of supply and demand, and then create a supporting graph. He gave us access to a good website that always has some nice economics-related articles, which is what I was using for that past couple commentaries. While searching for an article, I remembered my Junior Seminar essay topic, and then remembered hearing something about the biz section of Game Daily on the HotSpot. Put them together, and the next day I found myself presenting an article on how Real Game's debut into handhelds is going to help increase the demand for their games. It was so exciting to be able to talk about video games, and get graded on it as well!

Finally, I have one more point on how school is getting into my video games. This is probably also the most obvious relation too. My main focus with my schooling is my Computer Science course. We're learning the JAVA language, and it feels pretty cool to be one of the only four people taking the Higher Level course at my school. We've just finished learning GUI and arrays, and lo and behold, our assignment for the section was to turn a board game into a computer game. That's what I'm doing now in addition to my morality essay, and I've chosen Stratego as my board game of choice. Also, our Dossier program (which is a HUGH portion of our grade) we have to make later on has to have a purpose and help the user. What if I made a simulation game that helps train or prepare people for something, like some sort of tycoon game? For me, that'd be the ultimate proof that video games can be useful for something other than giving me acne from staying up late from raids.

I'm not telling you that you should force your math teacher to teach probability by using the drop rates of green items on Murlocs, but I think it has become pretty clear (to me at least) that games aren't really "the bane of your education" that they used to be. Sure, playing too much of it might affect those test scores, but hopefully once you get into high school at least you'll know better. It's a known fact that many courses use other forms of entertainment as a basis for learning topics; for example, you might analyze a movie for English or annotate a chart of the demand of oil in the United States. It makes me wonder when video games will start getting the same treatment. I know at least for me they already are starting to. Why analyze a poorly scripted movie when there are plenty of games that have very nice storylines? Why limit your psychology survey to your street when you can jump onto Second Life and reach a global audience? Nowadays, it might be too early to tell just how much video games can actively become a part of education. For now, I'm just happy that my good friends Video Game and School are at least playing nicely with each other. Keep your schoolwork close, but your video games closer; you'll never know when it might come in handy.