Feb
5
The Games We Should Play
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As soon as you give something a name on the web, then anti-matter appears and the original ideas get lost in the welter of abuse which is web discourse. The word “gamification” is a classic example. Some clever fellow clearly felt that this coinage gave dignity and grandeur to the process of using game theory as a means of helping learners in all walks of life to find greater pleasure and more effective learning in acquiring skills or attributes needed for their advancement. As a result there fell upon his head a posse of academics concerned to create research around the idea that playing games turns peoples’ brains soft, fails to prepare them for the real world (no games played there?), and indeed that game theory was an elaborate entrapment created by the enemies of democracy and free speech to undermine Western Civilization as we know it today … What rubbish!
The first time I encountered teachers and designers building serious gaming scenarios to help learners learn was in the late 1990s. “Gamification” according to its wiki, http://gamification.org, has been in the bloodstream since 2004. If it has taken Farmville and AngryBirds and X Box to awaken some people to the pervasive presence of game theory within all of our thinking about the way we learn, then they stand convicted of not living in the twenty first century. Gaming is now tightly wrapped around the way we learn: the problem is that we still do not do it consistently, in large enough contexts, to create ultimate learning value. People who call themselves publishers, information service solution providers, content developers etc still have the notion that the game is something you add to the mix to lighten the load, provide some variety, change the pace or overcome a tricky and boring learning essential. But what if gaming was the core to our learning, the methodological base for instruction and measurement. What if it was the package that replaced the training manual and accomplished its assessment as well as handled its updating? What if, as much biological evidence demonstrates, games are the way we learn and we are just now returning to a full recognition of what that means?
Sitting in an armchair in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco one foggy day in June 2007 I opened a copy of Mackenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, published that year as Version 2.0 of his blog GAM3Y 7H3ORY, a networked book hosted online by Bob Stein’s Institute for the Future of the Book. Here is a sample: “Here is the guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: “To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”. In gamespace, what do we have? An atopia, a senseless, placeless realm where quite a different maxim rules: “From each according to his abilities – to each a rank and score? Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire matters. Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire: they desire what they win. The score is the thing. The rest is agony.” (para 021). Is this different to what you thought? Is it closer to passing that test, completing that continuous development assignment, getting those SATs, or satisfying all of those humiliating hurdles placed in the way of forward progress by those who have already progressed far enough forward not to be troubled by them any more. If you say “yes” to any of these questions then you are in danger of joining me on a dangerous road – towards a future for learning dominated by gaming.
But we are in good company. That hugely serious player, SAP, employs Mario Herger as its Global Head of Gamification (www.enterprize-gamification.com). MIT’s Learning Lab spawned Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) to create and test learning games for younger people and Microsoft created Kodu (http://www.kodugamelab.com/), a programming environment designed to allow users to build their own games on the XBox. And in most countries there is now a serious gaming industry, often with 10 to 15 years of experience behind them, mostly making serious games for user organizations, and unvisited and unblest by the publishers who should be their natural collaborators. Centres of excellence here in the UK include inventive survivors like Desq (www.desq.co.uk), the Sheffield -based developer with almost 15 years of intensive work around immersive experiences like DoomEd or the SimScience environment built for the Institute of Physics. Or look at Pixelearning (www.pixelearning.com) in Birmingham and its training environments, or the company created by its founder, Kevin Corti (SoshiGames – http://www.soshigames.com/, exploiting customer retention through social gaming). Then, around London’s Old Street Silicon Roundabout, see how many of the 800 start-ups are games related, like Michael Acton Smith’s hugely successful MoshiMonsters (http://www.moshimonsters.com/). As a director of CreatureLabs many years ago I recognize the DNA! The games thing is on the march, but the content businesses old-style are not yet aligned with it.
So lets drop “gamification” if we are going to get into some social backlash. Really, games for learning are not like that lesson on Friday afternoon when the teacher showed a filmstrip (younger readers can insert film-loop, film, TV programme, slides, video etc according to age or taste) and we all slept or gazed out of the window. They are the very stuff of learning and the keywords which we shall associate with them are engagement, immersion, collaboration. They will have their problems, but as well as the future of learning they are also the future of assessment.
FOOTNOTE While continuing to use this blog to record a view of information marketplaces and the players within them, I would also like to devote a regular item to looking at what I am increasingly calling the Post Digital Information World. This does not mean that I think that we shall renege at all on the digitalization of all forms of communication – just that once infrastructures are in place, and the majority of human society is connected to a networked society, it is conceivable that the next stages of development, while they are faster and even less supportive of current business models, will be different in type and style. The current debate about the future of email highlights this. More from me here later.