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G4C Features
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Opening of G4C Festival 2010
Posted by Hsing Wei on 05-26-10[This year’s official hashtag is #g4cfest10, for those who want to share or catch up via Twitter. We also have a few “Twambassadors” sharing what they notice throughout the festival on a g4c Twitter List.]
Games for Change board chairman Alan Gershenfeld introduced the festival with a nod to the shift from whether we should leverage games as a platform to how to leverage games as a platform for social change. Gershenfeld noted several new trends at this year’s event:
• as “bits cross borders seamlessly,” there is more international focus than in previous years
• a greater focus on games and learning, reflected in yesterday’s workshop on youth as game makers
• transmedia: the marriage of film, games, comics, mobile, and questions of the interplay between linear and interactive media
• the increased intersection of government and games
Aneesh Chopra, the surprisingly funny White House Chief Technology Officer, delivered the morning keynote. Chopra focused on the way the administration is using technology to change the way citizens interact with their government, moving from “there’s a form for that” to “there’s an app for that” to create a new results-oriented government. Chopra asked how government can tap into the creativity and entrepreneurship of the American people to cultivate new kinds of interaction with government data and inspire people to make a difference. He shared numerous examples of how the administration is working to fulfull its core principles—prioritization, transparency, engagement, and rapid results—through digital media:
• A USDA competition offering $60,000 in prizes for winning apps related to healthy nutrition for kids in two categories - ideas that take advantage of data sets geared toward parents, and those geared toward students.
• Through a public-private partnership, Text for Baby, a mobile health app that enables women to receive maternal health information by text message. There are now over 40,000 subscribers and the app is available in Spanish and English.
• Supporting programs like Case Western Reserve University’s development of community as learning lab programs, an example of how universities can extend their capabilities into the development of infrastructure.
• Health and Human Services released over 2000 datasets that describe communities’ health performance, and volunteers have since developed Community Clash, an interactive card game to help people understand community health data.
• Data.gov puts the data in citizens hands so they can do with it what they need.
• -i6 Challenge is a competition to find six community based approaches to commercialize university research and create ecosystems that can bring ideas from campuses into the commercial sector.
• The DARPA balloon challenge tapped into the power of networks: the winning team used an innovative, tiered incentive model to spur citizen participation in the project. Since then, one of the team members transferred the model to address the hunger crisis.
• Healthcare Virtual Career Platform: currently developing the infrastructure for an open platform for providing learning materials that help people train/retrain for growth jobs in the healthcare industry.
In response to an audience question about equity in access to technology and what government is doing to address the necessary culture shift in low access communities, Chopra suggested a need to learn from the innovation of frugal engineering principles, and the administration’s “relentless focus on listening” to the needs of local communities. He also addressed an education question by commenting that we live in a world of SM and ET, not STEM, because engineering and technology are ill-defined in our education system. Giving an example from his work as CTO of Virginia, Chopra said that, in trying to spur innovation that increases engineering and technology education, in many cases these programs inadvertently integrated the arts as well. Chopra closed his presentation by announcing the winners of the Digital Media and Learning Game Changers competition.
The panel that followed built on this discussion of the intersection of games and the public interest, responding to the question of whether, like radio and television, the time has come for National Public Games. Three common ideas emerged across the speakers’ varied perspectives:
• like radio and television, the case for gaming in the public interest needs to be well documented, researched, and advocated for
• mobile technology expands the possibilities for public gaming
• private-public partnerships have great potential to advance the field
Bill Siemering, one of the creators of NPR’s “All Things Considered” shared the history of public radio’s founding, noting that radio and games have shared missions. Siemering described public radio’s origins as a scattering seeds across hard-to-reach areas of the country, becoming a place to learn and growing over time from an archipelago of college radio stations to the most distinguished format of radio. Nonetheless, he cautioned the audience that opposition is to be expected; when the idea of public radio came up for funding, there was a fear that it would dilute the impact of public television. He also mentioned his current work with Developing Radio to describe how mobile technology is expanding the interactivity of radio in places like Mozambique. PBS KIDS Interactive began her presentation with a clip of Mr. Rogers testifying before Congress. Dewitt pointed out that public television was a new model of how kids can learn, and now PBSKids.org and its games are developed with same process of education testing and focus on learning goals. Games are the #1 daily destination on PBSKids.org, a site that receives 9 million unique visitors per month and has successfully competed with Nickelodeon and Disney in the online game space, despite its public, non-commercial media budget. Dewitt added that PBSKids.org focuses not only on learning, but also helping kids learn how to interact socially online, and that their philosophy is that every new technology is an opportunity to teach. In line with Siemering’s note that documentation of success is essential, Dewitt announced a new research study that has found the PBS iPhone app for Martha Speaks research is showing improvements in vocabulary acquisition. Dewitt concluded that PBS Kids is looking ahead to the connection between games and the physical world, thanks to the learning opportunities afforded by mobile technology, and sees both further research and industry partners as keys to future success and innovation. Interestingly, she also mentioned that now some kids are first engaging with PBS online, not TV, and that content is going to be increasingly more transmedia, with users accessing it from different starting points.
As a member of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy team, Kumar Garg represented a different public sector perspective. Garg said that the White House is interested in gaming because it’s so deeply engaging and for its social collaborative nature. He posed several questions, such as:
• what convener role can the White House play to empower the game community?
• what is the potential for the mobile, anytime/anywhere capacity of games?
• how can we convene all the agencies who are interested in using games?
• how can we convert the agencies who are agnostic about games?
• what are we doing to ensure a pipeline of students who are makers and doers?
Garg sees the proliferation of low cost games and lower cost distribution as opportunities for niche game development, and hopes to see broader government involvement in the gaming space, building beyond the depth of innovation in gaming seen within the military and into areas such as healthcare and entrepreneurship. The final speaker, Laird Malamed of Nick Bilton, Clay Shirky, and Katie Salen gave short talks on the future of digital media, which, while diverse, all explored the role of data and information sharing.
Bilton spoke about both the classes he teaches at NYU and his work in research and development at The New York Times, where they have tried to use data to understand how to better engage site visitors. He showed how data are used to tell stories visually with a motion graphic of the US map, showing mobile and web visits to the site over the course of the day Michael Jackson died, and how the news spread. Bilton shared several ideas from his forthcoming book, I Live in the Future (and Here’s How it Works), particularly whether digital media is truly affecting our ability to multitask and concentrate. Bilton argues that there are limitations to multitasking, but it doesn’t mean we’re unable to switch between things at all; the way the brain switches between tasks depends on what the tasks are. He has also coined a term—technochondria—to describe a fear of new technology that goes as far back as the railway. Further supporting the first panel’s call for research, Bilton noted that existing research on gaming points to the opposite of people’s fears: studies show that playing games like Tetris increases attention and eye-hand coordination, and that laparoscopic surgeons who play video games are better surgeons. Bilton believes the inability to concentrate is not in the media themselves, but in the user interfaces and the volume of media we consume simultaneously. Nonetheless, our brains are adapting to the way we interact with new media, and he asserts that anyone who says our brains are not designed to play video games should consider that our brains are also not designed to read. Bilton suggested that digital media is also changing learning and our relationship with the news: now that more people are part of the news, there is greater social responsibility for it.
Clay Shirky also predicted the future through the lens of his new book, Cognitive Surplus, citing a study on primates that found that there is no such thing as sharing in itself: sharing of goods, information, and services are all three distinct behaviors. Using the example of Napster, Shirky believes that sharing in the digital world makes generosity easier because we’re required to give up less in order to share. He sees in this shift an opportunity to design around generosity, because humans have always been generous, and now digital media makes the radius and half-life of generosity much bigger. On the value of generosity and sharing, Shirky commented that the bar is raised when you put people into a collaborative setting (e.g., open source software) or when the combined utility of something is worth pooling resources. At the same time, he posed the question of dividing lines around sharing, giving the example of Apple, which built its rebirth around an open source operating system, but has the most closed, proprietary, albeit beautifully designed, device in the iPhone.
Katie Salen opened her talk about Quest to Learn, the school that she founded, by saying, “there is a lot of futureness all around us, how do we recognize that it’s here?” Q2L was created as a response to the need for schools to connect to the lives kids lead outside of school. Salen stated that the school’s design builds on the idea that games operate as incredible, pedagogical spaces. Salen walked the audience through a day in the life of Q2L students, demonstrating the emphasis on an ecology of learning spaces—examples of how digital media are used to connect students wherever they are, the use of data visualization for patterns of behavior and attitude, interdisciplinary learning around big ideas, and strong values of sharing and collaboration. She explained how the school addresses parental involvement—recognizing the risk parents are taking in sending their kids to a new school with new concepts—through tools such as podcasts. Salen also discussed the competencies based on state standards, systems thinking (21st century skills), and citizenship, and noted that all assessment is embedded in learning itself. She concluded with four tenets of the school’s design and practice:
• learning is rigorous but engaging
• games are used purposefully
• digital media are well integrated
• digital literacy is supported
During lunch, Frank Lantz and Karen Sideman continued their Games for Change tradition of the Frank Lantz and Karen Sideman show, this year with a new twist: the collective creation of a presentation by the audience, based on topics posted on slides, using a word association/found object approach. Lantz and Sideman would show a slide, then take “bids” from the audience to speak for two or three minutes on each of the following topics:
• The Different Types of Social Intelligence
• Play is the New Work
• An Important Thing People Need to Understand About Healthcare
• Educators and game designers…are both tasked with…how to create spaces that ultimately exist for people to do interesting things?
• McLuhan and games
• YouMedia
• What is the Singularity? (and why it won’t happen…or will it?)
• The act of observing determines what is observed
• Games, conflict, violence, and war
• What the Tea Party movement tells us about politics in America
• Fun is the original educational technology
• Sex, gender, and computation
• “It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, What matters is it’s out there” - Cokie Roberts
• The amazing truth about games and learning
• Dude, where’s my 21st century?
• What I want to change with my game
After lunch, Games for Change Executive Producer Asi Burak moderated a panel on developing mobile games in the developing world, which represented industry, academic, and nonprofit perspectives on the subject. While each speaker highlighted unique pilots of mobile games, they shared the message that the design of such games must center around the needs and cultural contexts of the target audience.
Subhi Quraishi of ZMQ, which has reached 64 million devices through their games in India and Africa, showed several games they have developed:
• Freedom HIV/AIDS project: a mobile health communication initiative that connected people living with HIV to the existing government health platform
• Africa Reach Program: 4 Java-based mobile games, created in local languages and with local NGO partners
• mobile games addressing domestic violence, based on existing TV daily soap opera episodes in Kenya
• a game to address indoor air pollution, due to the millions of deaths in India from kitchen smoke every year
Quraishi’s urged prospective mobile game designers to ask, what is the need of the people? Where are the gaps? And, how can we bridge to the country’s existing infrastructure?
Matthew Kam gave an overview of his research using mobile games to make education more accessible in countries where child labor is preventing kids from going to school. Working in India, their project’s human centered design process began with one hundred children, then two pilot programs. These pilots showed test score improvement, so it’s now critical to be able to scale. Kam noted that the instructional design drew from existing best practices on language learning/acquisition, but that at first their games were not intuitive to rural children because the games were highly Westernized. The researchers responded to this by studying game patterns and mechanics in traditional games played in villages and conducting a cross-cultural analysis in which they identified 37 non-trivial differences between western video games and traditional rural games. They have since prioritized creating and evaluating games not only as educational interventions but also to be culturally appropriate from the outset.
Prabhas Pokharel of Mobile Active, although cautious to say that there are widespread successes in mobile gaming in the developing world, echoed Quraishi and Kam’s message of needing to understand access and usage patterns, asking: are people sharing phones? do kids have access? ability/willingness to pay for games? Pokharel suggested that the impact is better demonstrated with a broader definition of mobile games/entertainment/media, and despite the limitations to mobile game development in these contexts, it’s important to leverage people’s comfort level with mobile interactivity and connectivity in general. Pokharel shared the example of Text for Change, a mobile HIV awareness and prevention game in Uganda. He also mentioned Fail Faire, an event that convened people who have developed mobile projects in the developing world to share and learn from failures.
For the afternoon session of talks on the Future of Digital Media, Jim Gee, Micah Sifry, and Clive Thompson sparked a lively debate about the future impact of digital media on government and civic participation. Gee’s somewhat dark prediction was based on the premise that there is no future to predict because of black swans, or things that are unpredictable, change everything. Gee argued that America has learned how to make a black swan happen quite predictably (credit default swaps) and none of those things could have happened without digital media. Gee predicted an end to public schools and widespread higher education system, a rise in virtual worlds and game playing, and the disappearance of national and cultural diversity. He concluded that there is a dangerous future that we need to work against by ensuring the next “black swan” is a good one. Sifry connected digital media, politics, and technology by saying that the two games we play every day are “government” and “news” and asked, what’s broken about them, and how can we fix it? He gave the example that we have an amazing piece of digital media in the live feed from BP of the oil spill, but that the website Congress put up for the live feed doesn’t work on most browsers. As Sfiry put it, we’re drowning in a gusher of real-time information and it’s a spectacle that comes at us from all sides, but we don’t have the action steps to respond and the institutions that mediate that process don’t think of us as capable of playing a role. Sifry also pointed out that, although the Obama administration is trying to make government more transparent, some of those efforts still feel very bureaucratic (like the EPA’s “submit a suggestion” for the oil spill). Sifry concluded his prediction by saying that the game of influencing government is already gamed by people with money, which needs to be fixed to open up the process of participation; digital media should be used not just to outrage us, but to move together to toward action. Finally, Clive Thompson made his predictions by posing the question: what will our first gamer president look like? Among his insights:
• gamers are good at uncovering hidden rules
• gamers who have played horror games understand scarcity, which legislators of the future will need to understand
• a gamer president would have no tolerance for the current lack of situational awareness in government
• grinding in gaming gives us a linear relationship between work and reward (“The American Dream”), a perspective the president should understand firsthand
The last panel of the day gave the audience advice on building a sustainable business model around making social issue games. Gobion Rowlands presented his business, whose goal is to make fun games that deal with the problems of 21st century society. Their game, Fate of the World, in which the player runs the world for 200 years, is designed to be provocative. Rowlands advised designers to think about how huge the gaming audience is, even when making a niche game. He outlined three main funding routes:
• foundations/government
• “traditional” game publishers
• angel/venture capital investment
Then suggested choosing your distribution (all are unique markets with their own competition and needs):
• free to play/casual
• commercial: online and boxed copy
• educational/schools
• corporate training
And finally, gave these points of marketing advice:
• Do PR, not marketing
• Learn how the press works
• Make a good trailer
• Journalists are humans, too
• Your game actually matters
• Participate in the community
• Be provocative!
• Don’t be literal
Michael Angst of ELine Media, which works to balance commercial game publishing with youth empowerment and is the publisher of the popular educational game design platform, Gamestar Mechanic, suggested first and foremost that game design businesses must understand and align all stakeholders. Angst noted that making games for impact often involves balancing the goals of diverse stakeholders: public interest funders, private funders, commercial partners, academic institutions, and nonprofit partners. He cited the concept of the double bottom line, in which financial success is only meaningful if the product has impact, and advised developers to choose revenue models that are organically aligned to the gameplay and expectations of the player community, as well as to think of their game as a service, not as a product. Finally, he suggested using the game’s community of interest to help with promotion and distribution.
Dr. James M. Bower, was the final speaker of the panel; his company Numedeon created Whyville, which is based on research Bower conducted at CalTech. Speaking from his experience as an academic computational neuroscientist, he cited independence, control, and sustainability as his three reasons for forming a company and leaving the university setting to develop his platform. Bower argued that if you build something that is valuable and useful, it can sustain the market. He also advised developers to spend as much time thinking about how to measure their game’s impact as they do designing the game itself. Bower identified the following challenges to bringing a social impact game successfully to market:
• the one-offs: need context for players’ motivation and impact
• shelf space: how do you differentiate your game in such a crowded gaming environment?
• feedback: 30/70 rule, reserve budget for incorporating feedback on future iterations
• collaborative design: kids are better at this than adults
Bower announced that Whyville is opening a game arcade for designers to post their games for play-testing by kids on Whyville and concluded by positing that textbooks are giving way to digital media, and not in the form of digitized textbooks, creating an opportunity for games to be the new structure of curriculum.
Day 1 concluded with the annual Games Expo Night, but not before Ze Frank closed the day with his keynote, “Games for Change: A Meditation.” Frank reflected on when he first heard about games for change, and how unsettling the term was, like tofu candy corn, or baconnaise. He quoted the Bible and gave demos of his own games: Atheist, Buddhist, and Christian. He described his struggle with spending a lot of time creating play spaces, then getting really bored and moving on, then seeing a therapist and learning about the Jungian neurosis of puer aeternus, or eternal child, who has difficulty finding the right kind of job, belief in changing the world, lives in a fantasy world, and suffers feelings of a “provisional life” and that one is not yet in real life. Frank posed the concept of network dynamics of human behavior: why can’t we predict how we ourselves are going to act in specific situations? He worried over the power that Mark “Siddhartha” Zuckerberg has in staring down a network with the greatest dataset in all of history. Finally, he reflected on advice from yesterday’s G4C 101.5 workshop, such as “don’t smooth out the rough edges” and “iterate, iterate, iterate” to conclude that games for change, with its conflict of child vs. adult, game vs. change, calls up a deep and powerful dark art.
By Emily Kornblut
Comments
Posted on July 1 2010 1:10 AM
Bower announced that Whyville is opening a game arcade for designers to post their games for play-testing by kids on Whyville and concluded by positing that textbooks are giving way to digital media, and not in the form of digitized textbooks, creating an opportunity for games to be the new structure of curriculum.