Games For Change: How Does a Game Change the World?

I just returned from the Games for Change Festival held April 22, 23, and 25 in New York City, where some fascinating speakers and attendees got me thinking about games all over again.

Larry Cocco and I, as cofounders of the Games4Ed.org collaborative attended as guests of Games for Change to help move conversations along with respect to games as vehicles for learning and social good.

Pulitzer Prize winning authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn gave an inspiring keynote, pointing out that the things that we think of as entertainment can have a profound unanticipated effect on world problems. We underestimate what games can do to change the way we feel, think, and act. They challenged us to focus on huge problems we can all unite around like inequality of opportunity. Want your game to make a difference? Figure out how you’re going to reach 50 million people.

After the keynote, I got to dive into one of my favorite topics in a conversation with Bron Stuckey, an Australian educator and game based learning innovator. We quickly zeroed in on games for education. We know that games can get kids to do really hard things and engage for a really long period of time. When they master games, they walk away with a great sense of accomplishment. If kids approached learning with this same attitude, if they had that same desire to win at learning, how many limits of education would fall away?

Doris Rush, of DePaul University, and Drew Davidson, of Carnegie Mellon University, asked a question I have been thinking about a lot lately: What makes a game good? They presented the reflective argument that a good game must create “real” situations. A sense of importance draws players in. The game should tap into the imagination to build these situations, but more than that, a good game provides embodied experiences- real sensorimotor adventures involving the body and brain. Finally, a good game must offer choice through exploration and experimentation. Players need the freedom to fail, and freedom to try on new identities.

Later on, Michael Gallagher of the ESA shared some thought-provoking statistics:

42% of Americans play video games more than 3 hours a week. 48% of parents play video games with their kids at least weekly, and 64% of parents believe that video games have a positive impact on their child. He put the question plainly:

“Why teach through video games? Why make medicine when you can make cotton candy that’s good for you?”

Jesse Schell, of game design and development company Schell Games, picked up one of the keynote themes and ran with it. He explored the question: how do you develop a game that has a large social effect?

His 120+ person company goes through the following 7 steps:

1. Start with a high level outcome: what problem are you trying to solve

2. Organize domain resources, the people and/or materials that are already involved and knowledgeable in this area

3. Exchange expertise between the development team and domain experts: developers won’t intuitively understand the nuances of the problem, and domain experts won’t know what is involved in good game design

4. Define transformational goals: what are the problems and barriers for players to change, and how will you know that the players are progressing?

5. Create agreement on key theory, knowledge, experience and skills to achieve each player transformation goal: each goal could be approached in a multitude of ways, which ones might the game address and how

6. Establish game application strategies to support transformation: what methods, actions, and goals support the best game

7. Develop and create, which includes development activities, playtesting, game and player evaluation, and iteration (including possible iteration of the goals)

Rovio Fun Learning are the makers of the wildly popular Angry Birds game. They shared the encouraging news that educational iterations of Angry Birds are being developed for elementary classes in Finland, and they are partnering with NASA to develop a version for teaching physics concepts. Rovio laid out a comprehensive idea of what makes learning fun

Learning is fun when

1. You love what you do

2. You can choose how you learn

3. You feel safe

4. It becomes a healthy addiction

5. You are appreciated for who you are

6. The environment is inspiring

7. It is fun to fail

Rovio made the point that the whole idea that we have to make learning fun is all wrong. Learning is one of the most awesome experiences you can have as a human being. Neuroscience shows that games activate the same synapses as learning. We win when learning and fun are indistinguishable. In fact, there is a whole branch of neuroscience that has started to examine the fun of learning.

It’s going to be a great ride.

If you are interested in participating in Games4Ed, we are looking to facilitate pilots of education games in schools, help educators evaluate games, conduct research, and help define sustainable models for creating, supporting, and distributing education games. Register at our website: http://www.games4ed.org/registration.

If you would like to know more about the growing use of games in education, please contact us.