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G4C Features
Previous entry: G4C Festival Day 1 Summary
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G4C Festival Day 2 Summary
Posted by Mark Smith on 05-30-09Posted by Emily Kornblut
This year’s Festival wrapped up with its third day of keynotes, panels, and conversations, with speakers throughout the day not only exploring how social issues can be integrated into games, but also considering how the best of gaming can create social change in the world.
To open the final day, Henry Jenkins and James Paul Gee engaged in a “fireside chat” on topics from how people learn from games, to the opportunity to transfer elements of participatory culture to participatory democracy, to what gaming can tell us about the future of schools. Using the example of his current work on women who become designers through playing The Sims, Gee suggested that passion, although treated as a trivial factor in schools, is the key to deep learning. Gee and Jenkins also agreed that the communities surrounding games play a critical role in creating space for discussion and mentorship that cultivates learning. Although these best features of learning in game communities are hard to replicate in schools, both Gee and Jenkins suggested that the institution of school is in need—and on the verge—of a paradigm shift. Responding to a question from the audience, Jenkins observed that the term “serious games” may displace fun, a key entry point into gaming in the first place, and instead suggested that we need to harness the power of play.
On the two morning panel tracks, the strategy sessions focused on the perspectives of funders and an example of a public/private partnership while the action sessions looked at ethics and game design, as well as the new participatory-driven mindset of game design.
Sharing their insights as funders of game-based projects, Jessica Goldfin of the Knight Foundation, Benjamin Stokes of the MacArthur Foundation, and Arlene De Strulle of the National Science Foundation offered the audience details on how grantseekers can approach them and how foundations are looking for help from projects. While each presented a different approach to funding gaming initiatives, all three recommended building personal relationships with funders and educating them about your project’s goals. Goldfin and Stokes also recommended the Knight News Challenge and the HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition, contests supported by their respective foundations as open calls for new ideas from the field. Stokes noted that MacArthur takes a unique approach in requiring that its projects ask a question, not just propose a solution. De Strulle emphasized that, while NSF is supporting gaming across all its divisions, it requires projects to focus on building the body of evidence around the impact of games on learning.
As an example of what a game can look like when it is the product of a public-private partnership, representatives of Warner Brothers and PEPFAR discussed their game Pamoja Mtaani, designed as an intervention for high risk behaviors leading to HIV, created for youth in Nairobi. Deployed in community centers on World AIDS Day 2008, the partnership took advantage of Warner Brothers’ existing game engine and entertainment and storytelling expertise, with the programming and connections PEPFAR already had with local groups in Kenya. The project also includes an extensive evaluation to measure behavior change and assess whether the game can increase youth self-efficacy along five risk factors. Echoing the advice of previous speakers, the panel stressed the importance of evaluation during both game design and implementation.
The ethics and game design panel included John Nordlinger of Microsoft, Allyson Bryant of Nickelodeon, Sam Gilbert, Research Assistant at project zero, Harvard and Doris Rusch, Post Doctoral Researcher at MIT Comparative Media Studies, Singapore-MIT. Bryant described Nickelodeon’s approach to ethics as designed to promote family co-play and building children’s self-efficacy, and Sam Gilbert discussed his work at project zero on designing games that support ethical play. Nordlinger observed that it’s not as much fun if you don’t know WHY you play games, and that the distinction between game ethics and real world ethics is not real and the line is blurring. One question raised during this panel was whether games should make people uncomfortable, and if companies have a responsibility to make people comfortable; the representatives from Microsoft and Nickelodeon both responded that their companies are very cautious in trying to create products that will not offend their audiences.
After a high school student addressed the audience with her insights about how to engage young people with games, Ivan Games, Sean Duncan, Moses Wolfenstein and John Martin from the UW-Madison Games, Learning and Society group led the “designer mindset” panel. In showing how game design has become more participatory, they shared examples such as Gamestar Mechanic and their own work on Local Games Lab, creating place-based mobile games.
During lunch, Frank Lantz and Karen Sideman revived their popular “the Frank Lantz and Karen Sideman show” with a review of their own sources of inspiration in order to answer the question, “is the field of G4C becoming so established that we’re starting to constrain what a game for change is?” Things that inspire Lantz include:
-economist Robin Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias: an example of game thinking applied to policy
-Gray by Intuition Games
-Kidney Chains: min-maxing approach to organ donor matching
-DayJet
Sideman shared the inspiration she finds in things that are modular, emergent, and distributed: Google Image Labeler, LOLCats, and Terry Pratchett novels, respectively, saying that the more people attach individual meaning to content, the deeper the meaning becomes for everyone.
The afternoon continued with a conversation between writer Clive Thompson and game designer Ian Bogost about news and games. Talking about the rise of infographics and interactive maps as news reporting tools, they cited The Redstricting Game and Budget Hero as good examples of games that tie these elements together with game play. Bogost also pointed out that games have been in the news for over a century, and the crossword puzzle continues today to be an entry point to newspapers for many people. Looking to the future of news reporting, Thompson observed that newspapers can learn from games about good uses of incentives and community tools to draw readers in as contributors to news; Bogost introduced a concept he is now exploring, “computational journalism”, in which the people reporting news should know how to use the tools needed to create news artifacts, such as infographics and games.
And bringing this year’s Festival to a close, Lucy Bradshaw, the Executive Producer of Spore, walked the audience through the ways games have changed, the impact they are having on their players, and the possibility they have for creating social change. She cited examples of their use in medicine and the military, and mentioned how families with autistic children have written to her, saying that creating their own creature in Spore gave kids the ability to connect behavior to feelings; that their kids are “hardwired for gaming.” Bradshaw’s message about her own games, which were not designed to be educational, supported what Jenkins and Gee noted earlier that morning: the games foster learning through transformational experiences and are successful because they give players a personal hook and the ability to create content and share experiences. Looking ahead, Bradshaw said, “we’re trying to make game-makers out of the gamers who have been playing all these years,” and predicted opportunities for social change in that new platforms like flash-based and mobile games will make them more accessible for classroom use, and a new generation of “Millennial” game designers are entering the field with stronger skills and idealism.
For additional detailed notes and live blogging of the final day of the festival, check out Moses Wolfenstein’s live blogging and @jafish‘s notes.
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