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Serious games: playing for a better world

games.for.change.2.pngThe late US political scientist Clark Abt helped launch a movement with his 1970 book “Serious Games,” which explored ways in which games could be used to promote education and solve problems. More than four decades later, it would appear that serious games are at last coming into their own as a field of research and development. The next question is whether they will live up to their potential.

The general feeling at the eighth annual Games for Change Festival in New York City earlier this week was yes, they will. Or May. Eventually.

Which isn’t to say that some games haven’t succeeded as educational tools already. It seemed that everybody at the conference had played The Oregon Trail, designed to help kids understand challenges that came along with manifest destiny in the 19th century. In Zombie Division, kids pick up different weapons, each of which has a number, and then they need to divide that number into the number on the chest of a given skeleton. “If you meet a skeleton with the number 18, you can kill it with a two or a nine but not a four or a five,” explains Ryan Baker, an assistant professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “If you are wrong, it will hit you back.”

The conference featured a growing cadre of researchers at various institutions who are turning their tools toward games in one fashion or another. Some are investigating human interactions, and how learning takes place. Others are working on game development in support of a variety of social, environmental and scientific causes. The movement is getting attention from policy wonks as well. Former Vice President Al Gore headlined the festival this week, and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has launched iCivics as an online gaming site to advance civics education for kids.


There was no shortage of new games, including Ludwig (pictured, top right), which mixes environment and physics through renewable energy development. But it’s clear that Ludwig is going to have a hard time competing with the fast cars, explosions and general violence of a blockbuster like Grand Theft Auto.

That has many game developers, like Gabe Newell of Valve Corporation, talking about the need to embed the learning seamlessly into the game. One example is Foldit, which allows gamers and anybody else to compete against scientists in solving problems in the field of protein folding (for more on that, see our coverage here). Newell says it would be easy enough to design games that help kids score highly on standardized tests, but he questions whether that isn’t missing the point. Aren’t the standardized tests themselves actually a surrogate? “If we knew what the goal if the standardized test was,” he says, “we could skip that and go to the next step.”

For his part, Baker is trying to put fill in these discussions with data by tracking computer logs while simultaneously observing the way that students use educational games and tutorials in formal class settings. Surprisingly, in one recent experiment he found that an “intelligent tutor” – basically computer learning program with no bells or whistles – engaged math students more than a math game. But those same students registered double the “delight” when they played the game.

So maybe one way to go is to start with an intelligent tutor and then insert gaming tools that create delight, he says. Like so many others, Baker believes the potential for games to educate is huge, but he sets modest goals. “If we could get kids to spend a little more time playing educational games instead of Grand Theft Auto, that’s probably a win,” he says.

There are other choices, too. In the words of one audience member, “the most successful online educational tool is called ‘Google search'”.

Comments

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    Sebastian Lelo de Larrea said:

    I wonder about the somewhat unjustified position towards Grand Theft Auto. Ungrounded information like this makes the article seem biased.

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    James said:

    I think a lot of people underestimate exactly how much games influence today’s generation.

    Some people even argue that first shooter games are just preparation for the army and a tool for recruiters.

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