Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.24.11 | Al Gore declares games “the new normal” and other news from Games for Change; “Portal 2” to allow educators to match game to lesson plans; “Virulent” launches at Games+Learning+Society conference; “Vanished” concludes two-month sci-fi mystery; more colleges add gaming curriculums; interview with a 22-year-old college grad on the future of gaming.

Gaming the System: The 8th Annual Games for Change festival convened this past week in New York City and big names in politics, the gaming industry and academia discussed, played and celebrated games that have a social impact.

While some of the speakers, panels and workshops stuck to the theoretical prognosticating or to the economics of marketing these types of games, much of the conference focused directly on learning, such as a pre-festival workshop on “Inspiring Digital Kids With Game Design”; a talk by Jim Shelton, the assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the U.S. Department of Education; or a strand of panels and speakers around the theme of “Design Patterns for Games for Learning.”

Those last two sessions are still available through the conference’s Livestream video archive.

Game Changer I: The festival keynote speakers have sparked a great deal of conversation online. Al Gore kicked it all off by proclaiming that “games are the new normal.” Besides the popularity of games themselves, businesses have latched on “gamification”—the use of gaming mechanics for non-game uses—to make their products more addictive and engaging.

The big question for Gore and others is will the same dynamic drive interest in and solutions to social problems. Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander, in her detailed post on Gore’s talk, summed up his optimism:

The ability of game features to enhance storylines and create meaning through quests, characters and experiences is one of its most promising applications. “And it’s amazing that by a three to one ratio, cooperation beats out competition,” says Gore. “People want the ability to cooperate with clear rules, and the ability to self-police.”

This preference for cooperation and community building is heartening for the games space, says Gore: “These social communities say something positive about us and what gamification can do. This industry is sometimes defined by some of the lowest common denominator games… but the cooperation over competition, and the social rules aspect is gaining momentum.”

He notes the impact and crucial value of play among all living things, and is especially drawn to the junction of gamification and social media, noting how Zynga allows FarmVille players to support various causes through the purchase of seeds in the game.

For Gore’s part, he personally hopes for a game that can support the momentum of his acclaimed work, An Inconvenient Truth. “I’ve been encouraged by recent developments like Trash Tycoon and Oceanopolis, and both have spurred my thinking in this area. In closing, I want to say that I’d love to work with any teams that are interested in making games that are focused on solutions to the climate crisis.

Charles Tsai, a consultant for social entrepreneurs, responded to Gore’s talk with a bit of skepticism (that he believes Gore also shares, to some extent) toward the ultimate potential of games to make concrete social changes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth giving gaming a shot.

Game Changer II: The keynote speaker for Day 2 of the festival was Gabe Newell, president of Valve Software, a company best-known for recently releasing the popular science-based game “Portal 2,” which Newell proudly sees as a harbinger of a new gaming model:

The interesting thing about Portal 2 is it doesn’t sort of fit the traditional simplistic model of what a game is. It’s not a collection of weapons. It’s not a collection of monsters. It’s really about science. It’s about spatial reasoning, it’s about learning physics, it’s about problem solving. And often, during the course of the game, you’re going to be solving problems with somebody else. The social model inside of it is collaborative and not competitive.

Ben Gilbert at Joystiq attended Newell’s talk and interviewed him afterwards. He noted Newell’s optimism, not only for the potential of these socially relevant games, but their inevitability:

Newell pointed out that Valve has seen “$165 million dollars in gross revenue” from the game since April 18. “We can do this. We can make educational, commercially successful games, which are gonna help us both on the game side and on the educational side.”

He reaffirmed this to me in an interview after the speech, saying, “I just don’t believe in this distinction between games and educational games. A lot of times [the label] ‘educational games’ is a way of being an excuse for bad game design or poor production values.”

Newell wanted to make his commitment to education clear by revealing that Valve will soon release an authoring tool to “Portal 2” that will allow educators to alter the game based on specific lesson plans:

“If you give us a lesson plan, we can give you a tool that allows kids to build content to lock down those lessons,” Newell detailed. “The number of times I solved problems about how fast will this be going at this time—how about if it’s on the moon?” In his words, “It’s a lot easier to get people excited about it [education] if they’re on the moon and they get to throw the rock at the piece of glass that breaks the glass that lets all the robots fly out.” We can all agree on that, Mr. Newell.

More on Gaming and Learning: If Games for Change is the Hollywood of gatherings focused on games with a social impact, then Games+Learning+Society, which just completed its 7th annual conference last week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the Sundance, a self-proclaimed “grass roots ‘indie’ event” that promotes “in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business” and hopes “to reinvent learning both in and out of formal schools through the promise of games and simulations.”

You can see a detailed listing and background on all the speakers and panels through the fully linked program. To cite one example, the Morgridge Institute for Research, a biomedical research organization, used the conference to launch, test and receive feedback on a digital learning game that was the result of a collaboration between scientists and education researchers.

“Virulent,” the game designed to teach concepts in systems biology, certainly has a compelling tagline:

We fight off host and cellular immune responses with armies of our virions, RNA genomes, and viral proteins. We steal energy and manipulate cell resources to spread our infection. We are infectious, we are disease, we are the Raven Virus. We have numbers and speed on our side, use us wisely and recklessly.

The game is available on the Morgridge Institute’s website and as an iPad app.

The Gamification of STEM: In the same vein (no pun intended!) as “Virulent,” MIT researchers created “Vanished,” a two-month long online social game pilot (begun in April and completed just recently; we previously covered it here), which Amy Jussel at Shaping Youth describes as “a cross between a sci-fi detective mystery about how to save planet earth and keep our eco-systems from vanishing and a living lab scavenger hunt in kids’ real world environs to unlock secrets.”

Jussel also transcribes a fascinating interview she had with an 11-year-old girl, Rylan, who played the entire game.

So You Want to Be a Creator (Not Just a Player): It’s hard not to follow the latest news in technology and gaming without running into another college or university that has a new program in game design. Southern Methodist University now has a masters program in video game development (coinciding with the video game industry boom in Texas). The information-science department at the University of North Florida now has a gaming and mobile applications concentration. 

An interesting approach comes from the computer science program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Recognizing that to really expand interest in computer programming and game design, it has created a scalable design curriculum that “aims to reinvent computer science education beginning at the middle school level, using games as the spark to ignite students’ interest in computing.”

Finally, it’s worth heading over to CNET to read Elinor Mills’ profile of Mae Tidman, 22, a recent graduate of Georgia Tech’s Computational Media program who want to stay in her home state of Georgia to join the burgeoning game design economy in Atlanta instead of escaping to what is seen as a game design gold rush on the West Coast. As a woman and as someone who sought a diverse technological education before focusing on game design, her perspective on the future of gaming is refreshing and revealing.