Thinking a little about gaming and information literacies

Right now, this is just something I have thought about on and off. Michael Lorenzen, of the blog Information Literacy Land of Confusion, had this post on "Gaming Literacy and Information Literacy" back in May. He discusses in brief how gamers acquire new skills or knowledge in a game on the basis of need at the moment. In other words, you learn it because you will be needing it down the road to level up or beat the boss at a stage. Mr. Lorenzen writes,

"This can be understood in information literacy. These same gamers are often college students. They take the lesson from the game world and apply it to life. They will only seek information in a library when it is required of them and then only right when the information is needed. Any wonder we see students at the Reference Desk the same day the assignment is due?"

Like him, I am not quite sure how to teach information literacy concepts applying these principles yet, but I do believe that it can be done, and we probably should be exploiting it. Right now, just another thing for me to think about and explore. If I had some investigation time during my little excursion back to basics, this would probably make a good research topic.