 |
|
G4C Features
Previous entry: Opening of G4C Festival 2010
Next entry: Notes from G4C + G4LI's Games for Learning Research and Design Innovation Day
G4C Festival: Day 2 Notes
Posted by Hsing Wei on 05-26-10In addition to the themes and trends of the previous two days of the festival, several new ideas emerged today, in particular:
• games’ potential to better prepare citizens for participation in all facets of civic life: school, work, the military, community
• the need remains to fully understand the connection between game play and game structures and the opportunities for real-world action
• in our quest to engage people with learning and civic participation, call upon the power of narrative that has been successful in other media, and use multiple media to expand on those storylines
Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative introduced the morning keynote, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Building on yesterday’s conversation about the intersection of government and games, Justice O’Connor talked about the urgent need for citizens to learn about the governmental system before they can participate. This need was her impetus for creating the iCivics project. Targeted to middle school students, the first game created by the project focused on the judicial branch, and has expanded to games on the executive and legislative branches. Only half the states in the US require civics and government credits to graduate high school, and at the middle school level, only three states include a separate civics course in their standards. Justice O’Connor asked, “how do you participate in a system you don’t understand?” Justice O’Connor reminded the audience that much of this system’s original purpose was to enable citizens to learn the skills and knowledge of self-governance. She admitted that at first she was skeptical of games, but now she believes students have to learn civics not just by reading, but by doing, and that iCivics is a practical tool for just that.
Justice O’Connor’s keynote was followed by another set of fascinating talks on the future of digital media. Kurt Squire, professor and the co-founder of Games, Learning, and Society presented his research on mobile learning environments, arguing that digital media is going to bring schools into the 21st century (which is already 10 percent over) whether they like it or not. His initiative put a mobile device in the hands of every student. Squire reported that they found surprisingly little classroom disruption, and that kids reported many more pro-social uses of phones than researchers expected. Moreover, the integration of mobile devices in school resulted in amplification of interest, self, social networks, and learning.
Squire described a neighborhood game design project that took place in three stages:
1) play space inquiry/citizen journalism, which used a place-based inquiry approach to identifying city planning challenges.
2) game design in a studio context, which cultivates the professional process and practice of game development.
3) a collaboratively designed augmented reality game in which the students created their own augmented reality game around a community issue that deeply impacted their lives.
Squire believes games fit well with mobile devices in learning because they are the best instantiation of situated learning theory. As one student reflected on his experience creating a game, “I forgot that I was in school.” Squire pointed out that the great opportunity of mobile learning is not just being anytime/anywhere, but that it can also be very specifically rooted in a particular place and time. He then shared several examples of other games and projects:
• ARIS
• Dow Day: a place-based history game about the riots in Madison, WI in 1967
• Lake Wingra environmental science game
• Albuquerque: a Spanish language and culture game
Squire concluded with two key themes:
1) The process of going from a user to a designer is like a model of community organizing: achieving competency, identifying exploits, changing rules, identifying superior strategies, inventing rule systems, and ultimately community organizing. This makes games a mechanism to participate in the world—as you become competent you want to do something about what you see happening around you.
2) With mobile devices, we can take kids out of the walls we’ve put up around them that currently keep them from participating.
For those interested in learning more about mobile games and learning, Squire suggested attending the day long workship at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in June.
Up next was Ken Perlin, the co-director of the Games for Learning Institute at NYU. Perlin observed that we currently pigeon holing young people (and adults), first into specific school seats and then into professional identities like scientist, artist, engineer, designer (and encourage them to consort with only their own kind). Perlin believes these characteristics (analytic vs aesthetic and exploration vs. implementation) exist in everyone, and his hope for the future is to cultivate each attribute in each young person. Perlin touched on the relationship between books—which he called windows into multiple worlds—and the future of digital media. He imagined intelligent books that will recognize readers across devices. Perlin passionately argued that the devices will fade into the background to play a role that supports people, rather than takes up people. He connected the recurring theme of transmedia and narratives, pointing out that if you create a compelling character of any sort, transmedia will form around it, be it Kermit the Frog or Sarah Palin. Perlin closed by discussing his own work in R&D, reminding us of Alan Kay’s statement that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
The last of this year’s nine “future” talks came from a perspective less familiar to the Games for Change community. Army Brigadier General Loree K. Sutton, the highest ranking psychiatrist in the military, put the future in the context of the next Greatest Generation. She asked how video games and the people in the auditorium could address the “unseen wounds” of war, the widespread mental health issues and brain injuries in the military community. BG Sutton stated that we have a challenge when less than 1% of our citizenry knows what it means to wear the military uniform; although we may be separated by whether we wear the uniform and where we fall on the political spectrum, we are all connected by every wound of war that is inflicted on our behalf. She argued that this health crisis is not only medical and that “we cannot treat our way out of this challenge” to get members of the military from recovery to resilience. She also suggested that the most critical imperative is a cultural transformation from a “suck it up” or pathological approach to mental health to a community-based, public health one. BG Sutton went on to explain the role that games and other media are playing in her work to achieve this shift, including the creation of America’s Army, a collaboration with Sesame Workshop, and Theater of War. BG Sutton explained that her goal is to use games and other immersive learning experiences to engage soldiers’ hearts, minds, and spirits. Her colleague, Captain Russell Shilling, added that destigmatizing these issues among the general public is as important, if not more, than doing so within the military itself. The goals of their game initiatives are psychological health education, traversing the complex bureaucracy soldiers face, destigmatizing mental health issues, and teaching soldiers how to recognize mental health issues in others.
In response to a question about the impact of war games on the general population, BG Sutton said she is greatly disturbed by how compelling war games are in their ability to do things like draw a player into commiting war crimes, but sees an opportunity to take the war-wounded characters and construct games around them in a more hopeful, positive way. She is also concerned about the use of commercial video games in the military recruiting process for the way it sends the message that killing is the point of serving as a warrior, when in fact it’s about a set of values and an ethos. BG Sutton suggested that we need games in the recruiting process that cultivate resiliency as well as the military’s values.
The last panel of the morning gave the audience insights into the perspectives of grantmakers who fund gaming projects. Michael Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, moderated the panel around four key questions:
• how are games part of funding strategy?
• what are funders’ expectations around success metrics and evaluation?
• what is on the horizon for funding games?
• examples of double bottom line and public-private partnerships?
Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative explained that their motivation for funding games is rooted in the shift in understanding learning from a model of consumption to one of participation and production that is fundamentally social. She believes games are at the core of this, and that the paradigm shift has been so big that as a foundation they have stepped away from evaluation so that grantees have more freedom to think in new and creative ways. Although MacArthur is starting to initiate public-private partnerships, Yowell is concerned that they may pull thinking back toward old paradigms. Nonetheless, she hoped for larger game platforms to start opening up for independent and social issue developers, greater interest in design experimentation, more research in the study of pathways and trajectories of kids’ gameplay, and game companies partnering with learning scientists to understand the next generation of learners. A major finding of projects they have funded is that kids are doing amazing things online, and there are few adults attending to it, so there is a huge need for mentoring in the social networking space and for research on child-adult co-participation online.
Robert Torres of The Gates Foundation, and self-described product of MacArthur Foundation funding on digital media and learning, said that this involvement is now informing his work at Gates. The Gates Foundation’s has two main funding initiatives: implementation of the new common core and the creation of formative assessments. In considering funding of the tools that might cultivate these two areas, Torres envisions among the possible criteria:
• degrees to which learning environments create communities of practice for kids
• degrees to which kids are producing content endemic to the domain in which they are learning
• how kids set the standards within their own communities of practice to drive the production of content
Tessie Topol represented Time Warner Cable’s philanthropic initiatives, which do not have a specific gaming strategy, but are focused on STEM through their Connect A Million Minds program. The initiative supported the development of the Connectory, a searchable database of afterschool STEM opportunities targeted to parents, and also supports First Robotics. Topol outlined the goals of their funding to be:
• increased awareness of the initiative
• the creation of consumer friendly content related to after-school STEM
• the ability to leverage popular social networks to encourage dialogue around these issues
The initiative’s next step is to gather input on how gaming can make after-school STEM more accessible to kids who don’t have the time, money, or access to participate in traditional/hands-on opportunities.
Finally, Christine Adamczyk of USAID spoke about the ways that games can be another tool in the arsenal to move toward development goals across the many sectors in which USAID works. She announced that USAID is in the concept stage of developing a gaming initiative, both the creation of new games and the adaptation of existing games. She pointed out that, although they are interested in digital games, in some settings where they work, board and card games are more appropriate because of access issues. She identified their key challenges as:
• bureaucratic: the government’s required emphasis on evaluation and outcomes
• leadership: educating agency leaders that “gaming” does not mean going to Las Vegas
• access: electricity and Internet
• cultural applications and adaptations
Responding to the question of how funders receive new ideas from prospective grantees, Topol said that Time Warner Cable uses a centralized application process, but is also interested in partnership more than just cutting a check to an organization. Yowell suggested MacArthur’s annual digital media and learning competition as the best way to get involved, but that they also try to announce new grantmaking criteria through their Spotlight blog; and Torres said that the Gates Foundation is still in the process of developing formal structures for this purpose.
Several optional gatherings convened over lunch, including a game demo representing Games for Change meeting the games industry as well as a conversation about games and assessment.
The panel that convened after lunch was described by moderator Ben Stokes as several years in the making; when the idea of a direct action games panel was first proposed, it was felt that the event wasn’t ready for it. The panel posed questions about the reality and theory of extending games into “real” world action like donating, volunteering, or protesting. Tracy Fullerton of USC started off by saying that games are usually safe practice spaces to take actions that one might not actually want to take in the real world. Which Stephen Duncombe of NYU countered with an opposing limitation: if all the good intentions of an impact game stay within the game and are not transferred into the real world. Duncombe added that often the tried and true techniques of direct action (petitions, rallies, and canvassing) aren’t very much fun, and some aren’t very efficacious. In fact, Duncombe argued that often direct action reaffirms the status quo instead of advancing social change, such as demonstrations against the Iraq War that legitimized it as being a real war. Together, the panel presented a grid with two axes as a way of thinking about where several examples sit on the spectra of motivations (in-game outcomes or rewards vs. social or civic outcomes) and actions (in-game rehearsals for the future vs. real world and immediate). And discussed where various games sat on this grid:
• Girl Scouts: real world actions, motivated by game-like challenges and rewards that cover a range of social, civic, artistic, and technical skills
• Grand Theft Auto: game actions that have no direct real world implications
• Critical Mass: in-game actions that take place in the real world, motivated by both in game rewards and social outcomes
• Urgent Evoke: real world actions, motivated by game-like challenges that cover a range of social, economic, and environmental issues
• A Force More Powerful: a simulation like America’s Army, but it’s unclear how to translate the game experience into real world action
• Rosario Habitat: game actions as rehearsal for real world actions, motivations are civic outcomes, and the mechanics of games are used to rehearse people for real world actions
• InterroBANG: real world actions, motivated by in-game actions
Fullerton and Duncombe concluded that there are games trying for the intersection of in-game rewards with real-world actions, but not as many in this space as they would like to see. Duncombe suggested that transformed consciousness is also a valuable real world outcome; play, art, and games can help you see the world from a different perspective. Although there aren’t discernable short term metrics of success from this, it still leads to social change on a different level. The panel concluded with questions about what it means for a game to be democratic. Duncombe pointed out that democratic games aren’t just games that reward democracy, but those that are constructed democratically, as opposed to being predetermined by a game designer with an invisible framework.
Next, in another new session format for Games for Change, Ty Ahmad-Taylor, creator of Fanfeedr, kicked off a series of minitalks, or Ignite-style, five minute presentations in which the speaker’s slides automatically advance every fifteen seconds. Here are the rundowns of these rapid-fire big ideas.
Patrick Meier of Ushahidi
• Ushahidi was originally a Kenyan initiative, launched during post-election violence, that enabled crisis mapping in which anyone in Kenya could report human rights abuses via SMS
• The platform is an aggregator with information displayed geographically, combing a vast information ecosystem for anything that can be mapped related to a crisis
• Ushahidi is now being used for the BP oil spill
• Its highest profile deployment was for post-earthquake rescue operations in Haiti
• 30% of Haitian population has a cell phone, so the disaster affected population could text what they needed, what they were experiencing, and the data was translated from Creole through a crowd sourced process
• Meier posed two questions: 1) can we apply mechanical turk services to crowd sourcing crises? 2)can we embed human intelligence tasks into multiplayer games to address crises?
Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer at Naughty Dog”
• eagerly awaiting the Charles Dickens of video games; it’s debatable how much change Dickens’s stories led to directly, but they created an environment for discussion and debate about social and political change
• There are now similar opportunities to use games to set the stage for change
• Many designers now are looking at how the systems of games produce cognitive or emotional effects
• The key to good storytelling design is to align ebb and flow of game play with the narrative
• We have a need for collaboration between storytellers across different media
Jessica Hammer
• People have a social desirability bias: they lie so they can say what they think is socially acceptable
• When they do this, people are engaging with their “inner book of etiquette” and larger social forces (answering a question a certain way, making certain choices during game play), rather than doing what you want them to do
• If your game play basically boils down to telling people what to do, they’re going to do what they think you expect
• Look for problems that people can’t solve with their inner “Miss Manners” so they are making an authentic decision
Suzanna Samstag
• Games have always been part of Korean culture: the verbs for to play and to perform were originally interchangeable in Korean
• Games are a huge part of the Korean economy, educational system
• She created a social issue game building camp for 5th and 6th graders last summer
• The campers created highly sophisticated game structures on topics such as CO2 reduction and home energy conservation
• She is now developing a game on the DMZ for elementary school students
Jane Pinkard of Foundation 9 Entertainment”
• Exploring love as a central narrative theme in games: games for emotional change
• What does the player do, and how does the player feel?
• Love is linked to play
• Players have formed emotional attachments in games: Final Fantasy 8, Nintendogs
• Tips for designers on a great “first date” in a videogame: have a sense of humor, make use of adrenaline-filled moments, let the player express herself, allow for vulnerability, the object of my affection is unique, and remember that love is a battlefield
Ntiedo Etuk of Tabula Digita
• The company’s goal is to make learning and educational achievement a lifestyle
• They are trying to understand changes in media use and psychology
• 90% of educators who have used them would recommend the games to their peers
• The games are being adopted by districts and states
• Despite criticism, they use multiple choice questions because teachers are comfortable with that format
• Their formula is increased engagement leading to increased achievement by meeting students where they are and making education more personalized
Brian Reich of Little M Media
• “Why?” is where the impact is
• We need a fundamental shift in the way we engage audiences
• We need better audience profiles to know what people do in their lives besides playing games
• We have to care about the non-serious games and why people play them
• We need to understand all platforms because people are engaging with multiple platforms simultaneously
• We need new models of making money in the context of how all industries are struggling for financial sustainability
• We need to redefine success because we don’t understand behavior shift well enough
Rob Dubbin of “The Colbert Report”
• Dubbin first told a ghost story, using his iPad as a campfire
• Aphorisms and game design are both constraints on reality
• Any aphorism can suggest a game design
• Use storytelling because a story doesn’t care if you succeed or fail
• Seeking feedback on his simulation: Fish
The last panel of the festival, moderated by Games for Change Executive Director Alex Quinn, distilled Monday’s Youth-Created Games workshop into a panel presentation. Betty Hayes of Tech Savvy Girls at Arizona State University summarized the following key points:
• game design is complex
• many youth game design programs started with a narrow focus, such as STEM or girls/technology
• should the focus of youth game design be on the technology, or on design?
• game design is being implemented in several frameworks: 1) game design and learning as educational equity, 2) game design as the transformation of learning itself, and 3) game design as raising awareness of social issues
Barry Joseph of Global Kids’ Online Leadership Program reflected on the way in which Games for Change brings together a range of subcommunities. Joseph reviewed the workshop by taking the audience on a tour of the tweets throughout the day on Monday, drawing out key insights from the participants. Colleen Macklin of PETLab took a similar approach by making a tag cloud of the tweets from the workshop. She pulled out several concepts—STEM vs. STEAM (should art be included in this skill set?), as well as the importance of skills, modding, and kids themselves to the youth game design process. Alex Quinn observed efforts to create sustainable business models for youth game design programs, as both Globaloria and Global Kids have done, as well as the question of whether the intersection of STEM and gaming is in the content of the games or in the design process experience.
This year’s festival closed with a keynote conversation between Games for Change Board chairman Alan Gershenfeld and Neal Baer, the Executive Producer of “Law & Order: SVU” and “ER.” Baer described his extensive educational journey, from graduate school in education to film school to medical school. It was during medical school that Baer first read Michael Crichton’s script for “ER”—he took it up because he felt that it accurately represented his experience as a resident (upon which much of Noah Wylie’s character was based). Baer attributed the success of both shows to being so story driven, even though they engage in complex and often technical or provocative topics. Baer encouraged game designers to take this cue from television drama and let characters be a key entry point into complex social issues and different perspectives. His strategy has been to run the social issues through the characters, in order to show differing and conflicting opinions as characters work through the issues from their respective points of view. Gershenfeld pointed out that many impact games have an obvious right and wrong choice, and Baer responded by saying that, again, game design can learn from narrative drama about making the outcomes of those choices more ambiguous, and thus the decisions more meaningful. Baer also acknowledged the importance of being aware of one’s perspective and bias, but not letting that overly influence the perspective of the narrative. Baer furthered the overall discussion of transmedia by sharing a project in which he expanded a “Law & Order: SVU” storyline related to rape in Congo by partnering with a range of organizations and influencers, such as Take Part, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, The Huffington Post, and Human Rights Watch. This coalition translated into over a million tweets about the episode and the issue, as well as landing pages on partner sites outlining actions that people can take on the issue. In this sense, Baer said he feels that he’s like a gamer, wanting to extend television stories beyond what he can do with traditional media and take advantage of transmedia opportunities. Baer left the audience with a final word of advice that applies across all media: take responsibility to be as accurate as possible when embedding social issues into games, because people do actually learn something from that interaction (be it playing, watching, reading), whether they realize it at the time or not.
By Emily Kornblut
Comments
