Perspectives on Scales, Contexts, and Directionality of Collaborations in and Around Virtual Worlds and Video Games

Interpersonal collaborations play a key role in video games and virtual worlds. Yet historically, research regarding games and virtual worlds in CSCL has focused on the smaller, more localized aspects of collaboration within games and virtual worlds. In this chapter, our goal is to broaden the ways in which we conceptualize the possibilities of CSCL in video games and virtual worlds. We argue for broadly and imaginatively expanding the scales, contexts, and directionality of collaborative learning, considering each area in turn and providing vignettes of research that break traditional bounds in considering what collaboration is, where it takes place, and how to study it in video games and virtual worlds. In the discussion, we turn to next steps for CSCL in addressing issues of scale, access, and methods that capture the richness and diversity of computer-supported collaborative learning in video games and virtual worlds.