I sincerely wish I could do something with Stephen’s comment about how the early quests are rather dry, but hey – do you remember the training quests in Lineage (attacking a dummy-scarecrow thing until you’d successfully hit it 300 times or something)? Or those early levels in WoW when you spent mind-numbing hours gathering herbs and figuring out which creatures you could and couldn’t really attack? The attentive reader of the syllabus will notice that the Quests are roughly structured around Bloom’s taxonomy, and yes – those early quests do involve a lot of “remember” and “understand” initial skills and knowledge development that a person needs to be able to complete the more difficult tasks.

I’ve pulled out references to “oral exams” and moved all assignments back into the blogs in order to keep more of the content in a written, and more easily shared, format. This should add value both for the on-campus and distance participants.

Some readers have assumed that because the course is modeled after games like WoW that the course will take place in a completely online / virtual world. Not so. The BYU credit-earning crowd will be playing significant portions of the game face-to-face, making their experience more like that of an old-skool RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. However, I’ll work with distance participants in the course to choose a common environment for them to play the game in (play by IM? play by Twitter? play in Second Life?) so that we can all find each other.

I continue to love your feedback. Many thanks for the comments you’ve left and the emails you’ve sent so far… Please keep them coming!