The Promise of Games in The Public Interest

By Suzanne Seggerman

President, Co-Founder, Games for Change

Games can be used for A LOT of purposes - well beyond entertainment. And as they are a young medium, they are not often envisioned beyond their current contexts; we are all still just getting used to them. Some people though have caught on early, and are using games in almost everything they do. Here's a list I excerpted from an email I received earlier this year outlining just some of the ways this one contractor/developer is using games: (Do read through it - it will surprise you.)

Core Values, Leadership, Lessons Learned, Communication, Ethics, Drug Abuse Prevention, Alcohol Abuse Prevention, Personnel Readiness, Teamwork, Coaching and Counseling, Time Delegation, Organizational Skills, Contingency Contracting, Personal Advancement, Suicide Prevention, PTSD, Psychological Health, Adaptability, Sexual Harassment, Ethical Leadership, Family Responsibility, Cross Cultural Communications, Reasoning Under Fire, Deployment Preparation, Equipment Readiness and Maintenance, Command and Control, Support Operations, Command Supply Discipline, Development of Junior Officers, Value and Limitations of Doctrine, Force Protection, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Wounded Warrior Transition, Anti-terrorism, Surveillance Detection,

If you read through the end of the list, you will probably be able to guess who this developer is making games for - the military. So why is the military using games for so much of what they do? Because they can. Because they have the foresight - and the means - to use this incredible technology to address all sorts of challenges they face.

So why not us? Why don't we who work in the public interest sector - the educators, NGOs, philanthropists - use games this extensively? Some of the challenges we face are just as important as those of the military - Educating our children. Raising awareness about public health concerns. Addressing poverty - These all stack up quite robustly alongside protecting our country. Yet, we are WAY behind. The public interest sector is often the last to adopt new technologies. We need to understand and use these new tools as much as they do.

So what do we do about it?

First we need a more informed public discourse about the medium. Games are not the enemy; they are not the corrupting forces of evil they are painted in most mainstream (and congressional) portraits of them. Parents, the media and our representatives in Washington need to understand games in a much broader context. Games can and should be used for a wide variety of public interest causes.

We need public funds as well. We need a dedicated resource pool for expanding the uses of digital media to address and engage the public in the core issues facing our country: poverty, educational disparities, healthcare issues, lots more. Games for Change is calling on a number of thought leaders, including the Cooney Center, to join with us to think through what we need to harness the incredible power of games and digital media to address some of the core issues our country faces. If the military gets it, why shouldn't we?

The outer spaces of learning

Colleen Macklin, Parsons The New School for Design

In the recent Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams we get to see what a 23^rd century Vulcan school was like for young Spock. Hundreds of crater-like pods, with 360-degree projection systems, allow individual students to navigate through an encyclopedic array of topics fully described through visualizations and sound. These images, as science fiction images often do, illuminate more about our present anxieties and desires than they do about possible futures. Star Trek fan and media theorist Henry Jenkins points out these conflicting visions in his blog, "Confessions of an Aca/Fan":

"In some ways, this is the future which many educators fear -- one where they have been displaced by the machine. In other ways, it is the future we hope for - one where there are no limits placed on the potentials of individual learners to advance."

As an interaction designer I can’t help but be fascinated by the design characteristics of these learning pods, particularly as a learning space and experience. Spatially, the pods enable a 360-degree view of virtual content, placing the student in the center of a whirl of information, visualized in formulas and images. Experientially, the intelligence (presumably artificial) that runs the displays also has a voice - quizzing the student on a wide array of subjects, from geometry to ethics. The effect is a high tech quiz or spelling bee, knowledge containable in a question and short answer. And in a reverse of the exploratory pleasures of the Internet, students merely provide the answers to questions asked by the computer – they don’t ask questions of their own. Perhaps we are glimpsing a Vulcan standardized test? While the delivery is individualized, as Jenkins points out, it’s also asocial, physically inactive (there’s no “learning by doing”), and if we take away the special effects, no more advanced than some of the drill-based learning methods we use today.

From the tricorder to the holodeck, Star Trek has, since its introduction in the 60s, had a tremendous influence on technology designers. Wah Ming Chang's communicator designs for the original TV series inspired Martin Cooper's mobile phone design research. Will the images of the 23^rd century Vulcan school influence future school design? In terms of a spatial and experiential approach to learning, I actually think there are more interesting examples present now, in the 21^st century. I’ll mention two of them, and why, from the perspective of interaction design, they promote not only cool new technologies and “special effects”, but also breakthroughs in the design of learning.

In SMALLab (Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab), a mixed-reality learning environment developed by ASU’s David Birchfield, students also inhabit a projected world where diverse subjects can switch as quickly as the speed of light. However, this is where the similarity between SMALLab and Star Trek’s vision ends. Instead of surrounding us at eye-level, the projections for SMALLab are on the floor. The fact that images are beneath you immediately activates the space. Like the lines chalked on the sidewalk forming a hopscotch court, SMALLab beckons for ACTION. We want to step, run, jump, and crawl on the interactive images beneath us. And the space also encourages this – it uses playful interaction to illuminate how systems work – from concrete poetry to physics. By using our bodies, SMALLab engages our minds in making sense of these systems. In addition, it is a social space. SMALLab has a multi-user interface promoting collaboration and team problem solving. Students learn by coordinating their actions, helping each other, and making sense of how the systems underlying knowledge about a subject actually behave and respond.

Like SMALLab, Mannahatta: The Game (M:TG), a prototype developed by PETLab at Parsons, takes students out of a typical learning environment – in this case, onto the streets of New York City. A collaboration with Dr. Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society, M:TG uses geographically tagged data about the ecosystems present on Manhattan island prior to colonization in 1609 to create a game of exploration and discovery. Currently available for the iPhone platform, the game requires that players traverse the city in order to uncover and link ecosystem elements, rebuilding the webs that once existed, city block by city block. Using the iPhone as a kind of detector, players are notified when a needed species (mountain lion, poplar tree) or eco-link (“food for”, “shelter for”) is available nearby. M:TG is a game, but it is also a platform for experimenting with how augmented reality and geo-spatial databases can be brought together to form a situated space for learning. In other words, M:TG takes learning out of the classroom and into the world.

These two examples are pilot environments and prototypes. They aren’t yet common, and the implications of these spaces are still being discovered. Both share the element of play, collaboration and creativity as a strategy for activating learning. These environments clearly diverge from current classroom norms – and they also go a step beyond their science fiction counterparts – by designing playful and rich spaces and experiences as integral to 21^st century learning.

SMALLab is one of the two dozen innovations that will be showcased at the Technology Playground demo space at the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age Forum on October 28.

Referenced:

Henry Jenkins, “Five Ways to Start a Conversation About the New Star Trek Film”. (blog post, May 12, 2009, accessed 9/28/09). http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/five_ways_to_start_a_conversat.html

SMALLab, see: http://www.instituteofplay.com/node/169 and http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/emlearning/smallab/smallab.php

The Purple Potty Theory of Passion

By James Paul Gee

Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies

Arizona State University

“Grit” is required for success today in the United States. “Grit” is passion plus persistence. Jobs that require basic or even higher, but standard, skills will often be low paying, done overseas, or automated. Success will more and more require high-level mastery and the ability to innovate. And that, in turn, requires grit. There are no short cuts.

There is no persistence without passion. How do people grow passion? We really don’t know near enough about passion, but let me tell you a story that shows one route to passion and then to grit. Tabby Lou is a woman who retired in her 60’s in ill health and became homebound. In the old days that could have been the end of the story: a retired shut in. However, Tabby Lou’s daughter and granddaughters played The Sims (a life and community simulation), the bestselling video game of all time, and she got hooked on playing the game.

One day, one of her granddaughters told Tabby Lou she wanted a purple potty to put into her Sim houses. The game doesn’t come with purple potties. But what grandmother would disappoint her grandchild? So Tabby Lou decided she just HAD to build one for her. But that meant she had to learn to make digital content for The Sims; she had to become a designer and not just a player. How could she do this? She needed help and some good, but complicated, digital tools to work with. This, too, in the old days could have been the end of the story: no help, no tools or the tools are too hard to learn on one’s own.

However, communities of people exist on the Internet passionately devoted to designing clothes, houses, furniture, landscapes, and stories for The Sims. These communities offer sophisticated digital 3D design tools and lucid mentoring. They are organized, when they are at their best, in interesting ways: Everyone is accepted in (newbies and experts are there together); no age grading (old and young are both there); everyone is helped to achieve mastery if they want it; everyone is allowed to get mentored and to mentor others, to learn and teach; everyone is expected to take a proactive individually dedicated stance towards learning that does not, however, exclude asking for help, but help that never undermines one’s proactive stance towards learning.

Tabby Lou used the community’s resources and made a purple potty. She had a very happy granddaughter. But her granddaughters today are not just happy, they are proud. Tabby Lou got hooked on the community and developed a passion for their passion: for design, not just designing purple potties. Today, over 13 million people have downloaded her designs. People have thanked her for her work over one million times in her guest book on the The Sims Resource site. She is internationally known.

Tabby Lou’s story gives a theory of passion, what I will call “the purple potty of passion”: The passion starts local and small: Tabby Lou is passionate about making a purple potty for her granddaughter. She found a community she came to love and its tools to realize that passion. The community is organized in such a way that she becomes passionate about the other people in the community and their shared passion (designing for The Sims). Energized by the community, wanting to rise in the community and to serve others in it, she persists through thousands of hours of practice with complex digital tools. She gets grit. She becomes a rock star.

Tabby Lou is a shut in, but she is not shut out of the global world. But many of our school children are. They are not getting grit for 21^st century design and digital skills. One way we can solve that problem is to apply the purple potty theory of passion. Get them passionately hooked on something local and personal, something THEY really want to do; lead them to a well organized learning community that has the tools and help they need; get them passionate about the community and its passion; within the community, their local and personal passion becomes more global. Their desire to rise in and serve the community leads to persistence in mastering the skills behind the community’s passion. Now they have grit in the service of 21^st century skills. They will become rock stars.

But school as we know them would be utterly changed if we applied the purple potty theory of passion. Different people have different passions. So everyone cannot have the same curriculum, though people with different passions can teach and collaborate with others to pool skills for larger endeavors. Communities that are very different from school are required. No age grading, no one single time scale for success for all. Members both learn and teach. Learners are proactive, but collaboration and help is not cheating.

So school reform—really learning reform for society, since learning today is 24/7 in and out of school—would be about helping people find their purple potty, the thing that, with the right tools and communities, will make them rock stars.