1	Video Games Changing the Day, One World at a Time
2	Session Two Welcome! Who are you? Who am I? When I was a kid...
3	"You are standing at the..." You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. > ?
4	"In A Valley" In A Valley You are in a valley in a forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed. > ?
5	Amazing Power! 10 Print “Hello”; 20 Goto 10;
6	The Future is Now! 10000110 10010110 01101100 01001010 10111010 11110111 01010010 01000110 00000101
7	Impetus Jubilee 1992...
8	The Last Session Gamer Facts & Myths How & What Games Teach Popularity and Prevalence of Gaming
9	In This Session Some of that stuff again Also: State of the Game Industry Games as Art? ‘Christian’ Games?
10	Colossians 2:8 "See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ."“ “Captive” = slave labor Game developers are on the ground floor of a new domain Move intentionally and thoughtfully
11	Later Heavy Subjects Games as Art Portraying the Human Condition Eternal Truths First things first...
12	Gamer Myths The Stereotype A Dissociated Male Teen A Social Misfit A Shallow View of Women A Predilection for Violence
13	Gamer Facts 92% of American kids ages 2-17 have regular access to video games Sony Playstation is in 25% of US homes Americans spend more $ on video games than movies each year Americans spend more time playing video games than watching rented videos 50% of Americans play video games in one form or another 4 out of 10 PC gamers are women The largest single gamer demographic is middle-aged women playing online puzzle games. Half of all gamers play with other family members
14	Gamer Facts It’s true: male teens play video games. So does everyone else Gaming is cross-gender Gaming is cross-generational Just as likely to happen in a social setting as not What about the other claims?
15	Gamer Myths The Stereotype A Dissociated Male Teen A Social Misfit A Shallow View of Women A Predilection for Violence
16	Gamer Myths Are video games responsible for the rise in juvenile crime?
17	Gamer Myths “I’ve played Pac-Man all my life, and I don’t feel the need to eat little balls and listen to disco music.” - David Lang The most self-defeating rallying cry in all of history: “It’s just a game.”
18	Gamer Facts Studies Inconclusive Focus on short-term behavior effects Assessment problem But...
19	Gamer Facts There is no rise in juvenile crime. “Just as video games were pouring into American homes on the crest of the personal computer wave, juvenile violence began to plummet. Juvenile murder charges dropped by about two-thirds from 1993 to the end of the decade and shows no signs of going back up. The rate of violence in schools hasn’t increased either – it just gets more media coverage.” Lawrence Sherman Criminologist, U of PA
20	Gamer Facts Beck & Wade Gamers are Irritable Perfectionist? More honest? In any case, irritable != Columbine
21	Gamer Facts Do video games objectify women? Some do, some don’t Problem not unique to this medium Lack of alternatives = Temporary
22	Gamer Facts Why so few alternatives? Easier to simulate a gunfight The “Uncanny Valley”
23	Gamer Facts Getting better in two ways: Understanding what trips the Uncanny Valley Simulating more complex behavior
24	Gamer Myths Do video games turn gamers into social misfits? Opportunity Cost Heart of the Worry
25	Gamer Facts The last session explored this question in depth. How our minds work How games have become remarkable teaching tools that affirm new theories Will revisit these concepts as needed For now, assume they’re good at teaching whatever it is they teach...
26	Gamer Facts But what do they teach? Last session covered that in depth too. Here’s a summary:
27	What Games Teach You are a hero. There’s something wrong with the world, but it can fixed. The world presents clear goals. Achieving those goals will benefit you personally and fix whatever is wrong with the world. You are guaranteed to be able to achieve those goals and you can do so through trial and error. Other people in the game are either in direct competition with you or can help you in some specific, structured way to meet your goals. You’ll have access to the resources you need when you need them unless you’ve squandered them. An opportunity without a quantifiable reward is a distraction. Unnecessary risk will hurt your chances of success. Repeated failure is expected. But if you get bored or frustrated beyond a level you feel is reasonable, you can blame the designers and abandon the mission.
28	What Games Teach Sounds like Fun! It’s Representational, not Descriptive Obviously not the real world This is only a bad thing if you: Presuppose being more real would be better Project what you want from other media Games and Novels e.g. have different goals Games simplify and provide embodied experiences.
29	What Games Teach Beck & Wade, Got Game, 2004 Lots of interesting stuff Two of the most insightful areas: Gamers and Teamwork The concept of Heroism
30	What Games Teach On the game generation and teamwork: “...with teamwork as with other professional attitudes, the game generation seems to have somehow accumulated experience beyond their years...gamers come into the workforce already preferring leadership styles that corporations often spend years training for.” Why? “[They’ve had] hundreds of chances to work together in a structured setting, as opposed to just hanging our of talking about work. The art of working together is social, but it is far different from the unstructured sociability of interacting without a defined goal.”
31	What Games Teach On the concept of heroism: “Boomer managers in typical organizations devote enormous energy to fine-tuning incentives, policies and management metrics. In large organizations, managers automatically assume that employees are profit maximizers; they will compete and cooperate in response to the incentives that managers provide. But heroes see incentives differently. It's not about money, it's not even really about being a hero. It’s about the experience of being a hero: of facing a challenge with real teeth, where the reward is partly service to some larger cause. Gamers will pursue incentives, but won’t be led by them."
32	What Games Teach Two more paraphrased asides on heroism from Beck & Wade: The idea that your performance matters to others is a fundamentally heroic belief. The hunger for challenge that requires your full attention is a hero’s desire.
33	Gamer Facts So... Gamers aren’t who we expect Don’t exhibit behaviors our parents feared Largely people they’d hoped we be The game industry isn’t what people expected either.
34	Games Are Ubiquitous 92% of American kids aged 2 to 17 have regular access to video games Sony Playstation alone is in 25% of all US homes Playstation 2 has sold over 100 million units.
35	Games Are Popular 50% of Americans play video games in one form or another 39% of PC gamers are women the single largest gamer demographic is middle-aged women playing online puzzle games the average gamer spends over 2.5 hours a day gaming A single MMO, World of Warcraft, claims over 5 million subscribers That's roughly twice the regular viewer numbers for Spongebob Squarepants The Average time online for a MMORPGer is over 20 hours/week That's the equivalent time of 2.5 million full-time jobs.
36	Games Are Big Money At a $16/month subscriber fee, WOW grosses $80 million/month. That's roughly the GDP of Monaco, Samoa or Lichtenstein. It's twice the GDP of Grenada and East Timor and three times the GDP of Tonga. Americans spend more money on video games each year than on going to the movies Microsoft spent $750 million on initial Xbox marketing In 2003, global sales for the entire game sector approached $28 billion. With that kind of money, you could buy Afghanistan and still afford to vacation in the Bahamas, because you could buy them too.
37	The Lay of the Land This has happened fast. 25 years ago, Atari became one of the most successful technology introductions in the US 3 million consoles a year 20 years later, the Sega Dreamcast duplicated that performance It was pulled off the market as a failure
38	The Lay of the Land Odds are very much against the little guy. Market dominated by a handful of big developer/publisher corporations. As publisher, they control the distribution channels as well. The garage developer might be able to earn a living, but it’s not easy.
39	The Lay of the Land More statistics (2004): EA is the largest game developer/publisher with annual revenues of $3 billion and a market capitalization of $15 billion. That’s bigger than Apple and Pixar combined. EA fills roughly 1,000 positions each year Team sizes on typical projects range from 20 to over 200 Projects take a year to several years to complete. MMO’s can take over 5 years. A typical budget for a console game is $3-5 million A next-gen game or an MMO is easily 3 to 5 times that or more. Most funding comes from publishers or venture capitalists outside the industry.
40	The Lay of the Land Stakes are very high Innovation is very risky Competition is fierce EA has been known to cut projects that they predict won’t be profitable enough.
41	The Lay of the Land Clearly, games impact: ourselves our world Game Industry Perception: faintly embarrassing part of the economic landscape or a defining part of growing up for millions How has this happened beneath so many noses? The answer: our fundamental notions of learning and the value of play.
42	How Games Teach Traditional Western concepts of knowledge and learning: Based on teachings of Aristotle and Plato Knowledge is a set of Facts Facts are pure and disembodied Knowledge and the Knower are Independent
43	How Games Teach Three Levels of Thought Frontal Lobe: Conscious A layer of intuitive, indirect, slower thought The Autonomic Nervous System Point: A good deal of our thought process doesn’t involve what we’d typically call “thought.”
44	How Games Teach Brains filter data They do it through pattern matching Point: A good deal of our thought process doesn’t involve the part of us we’d typically call “Me.”
45	How Games Teach Pattern Recognition Machines Running all the time Within and beneath conscious thought Endorphin pump association
46	How Games Teach Is the Biological Component of Learning Unsettling?
47	How Games Teach Pattern Matching...to what? Patterns come from two places: Hardwired (capacity for language) Embodied Experiences (Gee’s Bedroom)
48	How Games Teach Thinking rooted in embodied experiences implies: Thinking isn’t only mental Thinking isn’t even primarily mental
49	How Games Teach Thinking is Primarily Social Embodied experiences Rooted in a given culture Rooted in a set of affinity groups Interpretation of experience is guided
50	How Games Teach Every semiotic domain is literally embodied in a group of people who function together to define what fits and doesn’t fit in the domain. Fashion Physics Computer Science
51	How Games Teach The net result: Learning involves messing with your identity. We can be attracted to or repulsed by content based solely on our opinion of the dominant affinity group. Projective Identity flavors the content.
52	How Games Teach Projective Identity also imparts purpose (meaning) to a domain. Example: Tutoring inner-city kids.
53	How Games Teach Affinity Groups shape projective identity Affinity Groups also establish Appreciative Systems Can be wielded with evil intent Purpose is to educate new members
54	How Games Teach Games are tapping into an accurate model of how our minds work. How did they get this way? Darwinian Survival of the Fittest Games that: teach you well exploit the endorphin pump keep us working at their patterns ...do better and are copied
55	How Games Teach Disclaimer: the market is NOT predictable But the trend is observable Good ideas get reinforced, bad ones die, usually Here are some of the ways games have evolved...
56	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They provide a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ A space free from social pressure to perform A space with reduced consequences for failure This space is critical to some types of learning. Schools aren’t practice. If for no other reason, games are valuable because they provide this space in a world where it is otherwise unavailable.
57	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They keep players operating at the edge of their ‘regime of competence.’ In a classroom, usually: The advantaged are bored. The disadvantaged are frustrated. Games are good at adapting on-the-fly to skill level differences.
58	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They are fundamentally creative processes. Players must analyze a situation and formulate their own response. Their can be several ‘correct’ responses. Creative response is required. Creative interactivity encourages deep learning It requires active and critical thought about the domain space It leads to meta level thought about the domain as a whole and in relation to other domains “Encourage” is a key word. You can still choose to be a sponge. The point of this whole conference is to encourage you not to be a sponge.
59	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They reward tacit knowledge. Riding a bike versus listing its parts. Tacit knowledge can’t be learned apart from the experience. Tacit knowledge can’t be assessed apart from the experience. Schools, at best, ignore tacit knowledge. Schools, at worst, recognize but devalue it.
60	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They encourage ‘transfer’ This cross-domain thinking is usually considered a remarkable achievement. It happens in games all the time because: The space is safe to experiment in Designers know that players want their favorite solution styles to work Good designers know when they want a new solution response and solicit it intentionally
61	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They recognize the importance of projective identity. There are always three identities at play: The human player The game character The melding of the player and the character If I care about the character, I can be made to care about the things she cares about, and I can come to care about those things myself as well.
62	How Games Teach Games are good teachers because: They provide embodied experiences. Example: Civilization The ‘reality’ of life online
63	Games as a Medium The point: Games are good teachers So are other media To use games intentionally, we need to know their strengths and weaknesses How do games stack up?
64	Games as a Medium Koster: Music – emotion Games – action verbs Literature – both of those and more He goes on to contrast Story and Games...
65	Games as a Medium Games: Experiential Objectify Quantize and Classify About External Actions Stories: Vicarious Empathize Blur and Deepen About Internal Thoughts and Emotions
66	Games as a Medium Most games include a story Some games incorporate story well: Gwen’s Flute Riven’s Counting Toy
67	Games as a Medium But Games and Story have an inherent conflict of interest Games want you to grok essential patterns Games teach you to distill variation into essences Games teach you to look past fiction “It’s just a game!”
68	Games as a Medium Often the Game and the Story are Disconnected What the game communicates What the other bits communicate The other stuff becomes just wrapping
69	Games as a Medium Byron’s Rainbow Budget Books Father Abraham on CD-ROM Barbie Checkers
70	Games as a Medium Like a film, the sense, the Art is in the webbing. Koster: “Art and entertainment are not terms of type, they are terms of intensity.” Few games to date get it all together...
71	Games as Art The original Myst is one: Your game task is to piece together the story of what's happened in a strange, apparently abandoned world. To that end, your task is literally collecting pages from a book and assembling a whole. The music is mysterious and lonely, emphasizing the sense of loss engendered by this unfinished story. The spaces are fantastic and beautiful, in contrast to their isolation, which further drives to you to complete the tale. Ironically, completely assembling the pages is the losing condition. To win, you have to figure out that the story isn't over, that it continues in you the player.
72	Games as Art If a game can: Carry a coherent and consistent message in its webbing Illuminate a part of the human condition Do so with authorial intent I believe that’s Art.
73	Conclusion Given what we know: How our minds work How games reach us there Are video games: “Masturbation of the soul?” Or critical soul work?
74	Conclusion I believe they’re a type of critical soul work that the world would sorely miss if we deny ourselves the chance to play. Play is A fundamental, creative piece of who we are A way we image God A grateful response to God’s gifts to us Expresses an ongoing quest for learning and understanding Of ourselves And of each other
75	Conclusion Transformational Identity-play of your own Try on the idea of being an artist or a teacher as a game designer See if it fits If it does, pursue it with passion Rejoice in the psychosocial moratorium of Christ’s sacrifice Fill a critical role in our cultural mandate And keep your eyes and ears open...
76	Conclusion So that you “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy... A hubris that denies the value of games and play ...which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world... That there’s one type of knowledge, that it’s purely mental, and that games and play are frivolous ...rather than on Christ.” Who not only wants us to learn, but wants us to enjoy the process