Turning Point for Video Games with Learning Goals?
Filed at 8:33 am on June 15, 2009 • Leave a comment
A lot has changed since 2004, when the Games for Change conference in New York City first started. Spotlight reporter Heather Chaplin reports on G4C in 2009.
Back in 2004, documentary filmmaker Suzanne Seggerman, who had studied digital media couldn’t understand why games with a positive social mission weren’t part of the larger game eco-system.
After being rebuffed by gamemakers at the annual Game Developers Conference several years running, Seggerman founded Games for Change with Ben Stokes (now at MacArthur Foundation), Barry Joseph (Global Kids) and David Rejeski (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.)
Much has changed since those early days. This year, in fact, was a turning point, Seggerman said. In the past, people were brought together because they’d all had individual transformative experiences with games and knew in their guts that games ought to be used for advocating social causes and for learning.
But this year, Seggerman said, something was different. (And the change wasn’t just at Games for Change. Earlier this year also saw that Game Developers Conference in San Francisco host its first panel on positive social impact games and the creation by the International Game Developers Association of a special interest group devoted to the topic.)
In part, the change was the quantifiable results of the impact of games, as presented in one panel by MacArthur grantee Joe Kahne, and in part it was little things, like Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream wandering around the conference looking for help making a game, or Pulitzer-prize-winning New York Times columnist Nick Kristof delivering one of the keynotes and twittering about it to his tens of thousands of followers.
Kristof, by the way, is working on a game to go along with his upcoming book with Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky, about women in third-world countries. Kristof spoke at the conference about how games give people a sense of what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes, and thus motivate them toward social change.
Other session included MacArthur grantee Joe Kahne of Mills College discussing a study he’s doing on whether videogames foster real-life civic engagement; and grantees James Gee (Arizona State University), Constance Steinkuehler (University of Wisconsin), Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), and Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin) discussing new assessment methods allowed by digital media.
“The core idea behind games and assessment that Jim Gee’s been pushing for [that assessment should be incorporated into teaching], I think still has yet to be realized,” Squire said. “It would be great to see an interdisciplinary team get together and try to build something that integrates such an assessment.”
Gee spoke again the next day in a wide-ranging conversation with fellow MacArthur grantee Henry Jenkins (MIT) that spanned the necessity of passion in facilitating “deep” learning, how communities around games foster mentorships that cultivates learning, to Gee’s work on women and The Sims, to Jenkins’ growing interest in whether participatory culture leads to a participatory democracy.
Despite all the interesting conversations and thinkers gathered, there are still hurdles to overcome in the field.
For example, conspicuously absent from the conference were many new games. There is still no solid, consistent source of funding for getting learning or social impact games made. One new attendee to the conference, Stacy Abramson (Facing History), was surprised not only by the creative energy and enthusiasm at the conference, but also by the lack of any organized network of educators to facilitate distribution.
Independent game designer Eric Zimmerman pointed out another disconnect, this one between what experts such as Gee and Jenkins said learning games ought to look like and what nonprofits were actually planning.
“Literacy theorists like Jim Gee and Henry Jenkins were advocating approaches to creating games for change that were directly the opposite of what people in the room were actually doing,” Zimmerman said.
“The games created in the 101 Workshop, for example, were extremely literal and message-driven, whereas the learning experts said over and over that gameplay that made use of community and that let players come to their own conclusions were going to fulfill the promise of games on social issues.”
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