Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
Today witnessed Day 1 of the Education Arcade, organized by Henry Jenkins and the cool cats from MIT Comparative Media Studies. A couple hundred people filled the upstairs theater at the LA Convention Center. It's great to see so many people from many backgrounds -- including academics, teachers, administrators, game designers, journalists, TV producers, and others.
Here's my rather lengthy summary of the panels from today. These are my best attempts at accurate notes from the presentations, but keep in mind that I am assuredly not properly representing the speakers in these summaries.
Update: read my report on Education Arcade, Day 2
PANEL 1: ARE GAMES EDUCATIONAL
Henry Jenkins (MIT -- moderator)
Wagner James Au (Salon)
James Paul Gee (UW Madison)
Warren Spector (Ion Storm)
Brenda Laurel
Henry Jenkins
Henry started by sharing an anecdote about his son learning the electoral college from playing Randy Chase's Doonesbury Election Game (1996). When his son took the game to school, he was prohibited from playing -- while educational software was allowed, games were not. Henry pointed out that "game" is a threatening enough word that teachers did -- and often still do -- feel the need to exclude them.
Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).
Some stats Henry shared:
With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them.
Henry called for a movement from static simulations, which are used in many classrooms, to active or interactive tools, moving from traditional education to something new. What this knowledge does, and what it is useful for, underscores a general problem in American education today.
Henry closed by exploring some of the common criticisms of educational games:
(1) "Educational games don't sell." There is a circular logic here, argued Jenkins. Games with educational elements seem suddenly to repudiate their educational value when they sell (e.g. Sim City) It seems that the criticism of educational games is thus that "sucky eduational games don't sell" -- but who wants to make sucky educational games?
(2) "Educational games suck." Educational games are out of date, and have both poor educational and poor entertainment value. Henry offered Oregon Trail as a counter example, and suggested that one challenge has to do with distinguishing which games are good and which are bad, and why.
(3) "Educational games aren't games." The industry has explored such a small percentage of what games can do, that they are caught in the mindset that anything that teaches or has educational value just isn't a game.
(4) "Educational games aren't fun." Jenkins suggested that we replace "engagement" for "fun."
(5) "Educational games don't teach." There's no genie in games; cComputers aren't magical boxes, but allow you to do things that you can't do otherwise.
(6) "Educational standards are too great an obstacle." Even though drill & practice is the dominant mode, in American education especially, educational games can be used as part of broader pedagogical strategies.
(7) "Educational games communicate misinformation." Games allow configurative learning; players can redesign different models in games.
(8) "Educational games cost too much." Commercial games are widely available at reasonable prices and can provide educational value, and some commercial games have been repurposed as educational games (e.g. Typing of the Dead).
Wagner James Au
Au described his role as an embedded journalist in the MMOG/Virtual World Second Life. He explored whether commercial games are complex enough to be coopted for education, and shared Battlefield: Vietnam, which he recently covered for Salon. He cited Deus Ex's representation of complex society, and also noted examples of "in-world classes" in Second Life, including a theater student who used the VW for setbuilding.
James Paul Gee
Gee noted that his primary interest is the educational value of commercial of the shelf (COTS) games. He argued that games have the potential for improving learning by creating a "third being."
Commercial games, argued Gee, have very little in common with schooling as we know it, but a lot in common with cutting-edge science. When we play games, our minds and bodies reach into another space. It is not just the player who plays the game, nor just the game character, bur rather a "third being" that is a combination of these two. That being has a power that does not exist n regular curricula, a power characterized by "embodied movement in a virtual world."
Gee argued that the environments in games are not just eye candy -- they constitute complex systems with unpredictable interactions. As a player, unless you orient yourself to that system you cannot play successfully -- just try to admire the aesthetics of the world in Far Cry; you'll die in about 3 seconds.
According to Gee, games allow "embodied empathy for a complex system." Of scientific complex systems, such as weather, solar systems, and subatomic motion, none are considered them "cuddly" -- but in a game like far Cry or Demon Siege, you gain empathy for the complex system you are embodied in.
The deepest way to understand such a system is by taking the real body and mind and fusing it with the system. Gee argued that the primary educational achievement of games is in making this possibility available to everyday people. For example, in Deus Ex, the player explores how abilities should be distributed in the world, and connects this understanding with their embodiment in the world. Games and science are "packages" that involve other processes, tools, interactions, etc. with other people. In Deus Ex, different players play differently, and play in different social groups. Understanding this power will help us solve the problems of seeing the world just as pictures, a great danger of our contemporary times.
Brenda Laurel
Laurel talked about how educational games haven't worked, why, and what we should do instead.
School teaches basic skills. It used to do a pretty good job, but now we have a crisis. Starting i n the 20th century, school also provides socialization and, more importantly, also babysitting while parents go to work. School teaches test taking behavior. And school teaches about authority: teachers know more and have more power; students have no power. Students' ability to express agency is limited to "petty transgressions" or "achievements of excellence" within the structure provided by the school.
Even where there is play in school, such as in sports, play carries the same hierarchical rule -based structure. Laurel argued that the teaching of hierarchy is the primary function of public education in America -- designed to create an efficient underclass (even if there's not a conspiracy to do so). School trains kids to be good workers and buyers, which is, in Laurel's opinion, BAD NEWS.
Laurel pointed out that schools are incredibly immune to change. Gaming can't change schools. The kind of learning kids need is not going to come up in schools. When used in classrooms, games become an accessory to the same hierarchy; they don't puncture the spectacle of culture of politics.
Laurel waxed pessimistic about educational games. "I have never seen a good educational game," she said, "It's crap for 30 years." Public education does not teach young people to meaningfully exercise personal agency, to think critically, to use their voices, to engage in discourse, or to be good citizens. We don't need computer games in the schools, said Laurel, we need "affordances for young people to exercise meaningful personal agency." We need to engage in a kind of discourse and critique that can be make them creative, culture makers, and future citizens.
Warren Spector
Spector talked about Deus Ex as a world of humanity that asks questions like What is family?, What is the meaning of personal freedom?, What are we willing to sacrifice for it?
PLayers can explore real world spaces and do things we don'twant them doing in the real world
Get people thinking about thigns in a different way than they might do so otherwise. Everybody has motives; if we don't get people thinking more critically we're in a world of trouble. Games can get at that goal.
Spector called for a set of games that provide escape, but offer the player an understanding of why they are seeking that escape, like the work of Asimov or Stan Lee. He articulated the struggle of designing games like this because of industry pressure to simplify ("players want a bad guy to kill"). Games are the best way to break down the hierarchy of teaching and to allow people to think for themselves. We can force people to make decisions and show them the consequences in games; we don't have to coerce or lecture. Despite this promise, Spector cited games as "the only mediuum on the plant with no subtext." We need games that are about something, not just about getting past obstacles. Why am I going through that locked door? What are the consequences of the variety of ways I can get past that door?
PANEL 2 FROM SIMULATION TO INTERACTION
Kurt Squire (UW Madison -- moderator)
Amy Bruckman (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Ben Sawyer (Digitalmill)
Scott Fisher (University of Southern California)
Andrew Court (Dateline NBC)
Kurt Squire
Kurt gave more or less the same presentation he gave at the Serious Games Summit this year at GDC (that's ok, it's a good presentation). Games are not just about building perfect representational systems. Games also function as interactive systems. They draw in identities, as Jim Gee argues, and they function as a hub of activity systems -- for discussion, argument, and thinking.
Squire described his research playing Civilization III with gradeschool students. The students took up the game for wildly different reasons.
(1) Transgressors -- opting out of history, "lies told by the man" took to the game quickly; history as a set of ideology as geographic/materialist history -- new
(2) Mini-maxers -- mathematicians, maximize game output by exploiting knowledge of games
(3) Exploreres -- geography and exploration of resources
(4) Socializers -- talk about hte games
(5) Nurterers -- buidl societies and make them happy
(6) Builders -- build acivilization
This wide range of styles/tastes provides differential access to the curriculum -- and new approaches to learning. No matter the approach, the students learned that to become good at the game you had to understand its ideology.
Amy Bruckman
Bruckman described some of her projects, including electronic learning communities that incorporate constructionist educational philosophy to allow students to create "personally meaningful projects," and online system for the discussion of ethics in a required CS class, an open source history project that allows high schoolers to do work online and critique other students.
Bruckman warned that the use of games in classrooms can be dangerous. Games appeal to some kids more than others, but educators have to provide content for all students. Students have a high expectation of "games" -- sometimes its better to avoid "the g word." It's hard to fit games to curricular and assessment needs, and there is an issue with freedom versus standardization -- "do what you want with these tools" creates divisions between kids -- some use the games, some don't. Taking away freedoms is at tension with using games for learning.
Scott Fisher
Fisher shared some of his experiences "breaking out of the branching structure of exploratory environments." He presented a "virtuality continuum," that moves from real environment, to augmented reality, to augmented virtuality, to virtual environment.
Fisher presented a series of projects, including the interesting Environmental Media Project, sponsored by Keio University and NTT Docomo, an augmented reality headset mated to a high speed mobile data device.
Ben Sawyer
Sawyer showed Virtual U, Digital Mill's cornerstone game project that teaches how university administration works. He advised prospective sponsors of educational games to talk to game designers -- they know how to make games.
Sawyer also reintroduced the Serious Games Initiative, meant to explore the opportunities for games sponsored by government, educational, and non-profit orgs. Aside from the military, the government hasn't done much with games.
Finally, Sawyer showed off Email Connect, the first of the Project Connect games my studio Persuasive Games is working on with Sawyer's Digital Mill and the Telecom Pioneers, a suite of games to teach telecommunications technology to 4 - 7 graders.
Andrew Court
Court is a producer at Dateline NBC, and he shared stories of the impact of working on some of the investigative reporting stories he's produced for that show. He told a story about landing in the Sudan to find out if the rubble below was a chemical weapons plant or a factory creating pharmaceuticals for third world countries.
Court had some intriguing and helpful insights about
relevance -- come to realize that learning should be interactive and active .. examples of vignettes of powerful experience
PANEL 3: EDUCATIONAL GAME CASE STUDY
This panel was devoted to a case study of Zoo Tycoon, developed by Blue Fang and published by Microsoft. Zoo Tycoon has sold over 4 million copies worldwide and also has expansion packs and a new version coming soon. Zoo Tycoon was related to Where World is Carmen San Diego -- a game built for retail, not for schools, that teachers later recognized for its educational potential.
A lot was made of the fact that "learning comes naturally" in this game. The developers claimed that it targets a "casual audience," including boys to age 12, girls to 13/14, and then skipping up to older players, primarily women. The developers asked, "how did 15 guys develop a game that mostly women like?" They didn't make this observation, but the nurturing and creative nature of the game may have something to do with its greater appeal to women.
PANEL 4: BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS: NEW COLLABORATIONS AMONG UNIVERSITIES, INDUSTRY, AND PUBLIC INSTITUTiONS
Alex Chisolm (LeapFrog Enterprises -- moderator)
Bonnie Bracey (LucasArts Foundation
Todd Logan (Stanford Media X)
Celia Pearce (University of California, Irvine)
Johnny Wilson (Author of High Score!)
Tom Piper (Royal Shakespeare Company)
Alex Chisholm
Chisholm underscored the importance of connecting conceptual work with productive work. He articulated an ESRB-like clarification for learning: "The Games for Learning Seal: certified by the education arcade," a certification and labeling experiment sponsored by MIT and under pilot by LeapFrog. The seal would annotate education, quality play, and standards to "provide a touchstone in the marketplace" for parents.
NOTE: I talked extensively with Chisholm and Henry Jenkins about the threat that such a label would become merely a convenience label for LeapFrog, but both assured me that they are going to great pains to involve a broad range of developer and educational partners to insure its viability. We'll see how this issue pans out
Johnny Wilson
Wilson clarified some of the problems with corporate and government partnership. He suggested that corporate partnership is difficult because there are conflicting issues of audience, distribution, and practicality for the sponsor and the developer. The one who controls the pursestrings controls the point of view. The complexity of conflicting goals, roles, and problems, including management change, schedules, corporate images, grant vs. investment, competitive issues, security or trade/ secrets, assumptions, and accuracy of content.
Government is worse, according to Wilson. Platform issues are a major issue, since many governmental orgs are far behind the hardware curve. Agenda issues are a bigger problem. Regulatory impacts and assumptions, data security issues, and game design disconnects can plague such collaborations.
Wilson also warned that games empower players, and empowerment goes against the grain. Games teach intuitively and cannot follow an obvious agenda. Games use unproven technology or push the envelope instead of sticking with safe tech. Games do not offer comfortable feedback mechanisms. All of these factors contribute to the challenge of partnerships.
Bonnie Bracey
Bracey discussed the integration of games in other environments. She called such environments "activity systems," not games, insisting that she never mentions games in educational contexts. She showed a game called Kinetic City, a collaboration between government and NPOs that teaches national science benchmark material through smallish games that test retention of other activities.
Todd Logan
Logan described Stanford's Media X project, a collaborative/interdisciplinary initiative across departments. The program boasts partnerships with several companies, including Nokia, Toyota, Macromedia, Boeing, and Fisher-Price. Logan described the applicability of his project to future business initiatives, mentioning workshops Media X has run to help companies. He also hinted at the possibility of embedding work in video games, a kind of "future of work," e.g. in MMOGs.
Celia Pearce
Pearce argued that all games are educational. She reminded us that games are hard to play and also hard to make -- newbies should keep this in mind. Games threaten the government, traditional education, and the media hegemony.
She then introduced the Cal-(IT)2 program, whose mission is to extend the reach of the internet throughout the physical world. UCI and UCSB participate in this program through an interdisciplinary relationship.
As she has explored collaborations with corporate partners, Pearce explained that she often has to remind industry that UCI is not a vocational training school, nor a source of interns. Rather, it is a research institute. They want collaborators not for profit, but for brains. We can't make you money, she argued, but we can think past next Christmas, which is the limit of the traditional industry, and we can think about a lot of things the industry doesn't have the luxury to think about.
Tom Piper
Coming from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Piper admitted that he felt a bit like "a virgin in an orgy." He described the Royal Shakespeare Company / MIT collaborations.
Piper noted that RSC has the experience of 1,000s of iterations of the same plays. This provides a rich framework to understand the various imaginative, immersive space. He sees games as an alternative way to use imagination and question the visual representations of the world.
He then described a project RSC and MIT are working on, a game experience similar to the Tempest. A "cabinet of curiosities" creates an experience similar to the play. transforms the world by manipulating objects and experiencing similarities.
Piper also shared some lessons from the collaboration. He admitted that he had assumed that MIT would "take care of things," and the RSC would just put its brand on the product, but he soon realized that the production needs momentum from both sides. IP issues, mutual understanding, timescale financing, project management, and market reception issues were challenges Piper articulated.
That's it for today! More tomorrow, for day 2 of the Education Arcade.
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