Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part One)

One of the many pleasures of running this blog is being able to introduce my readers to people who are doing cutting edge thinking about the many topics -- from fandom to serious games, from media literacy to civic media, from early sound comedy to transmedia storytelling -- that matter to me. Today, I want to introduce you to David Hutchison, the author of a recently released book, Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. Hutchison's book promises over 100 game activities appropriate for classroom use, a selection that spans across academic subjects (language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, history, geography, health & physical education, drama, music, visual arts, computers, and business) and grade levels (including both elementary and high school). Writers like James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, xx and David Shaffer, have made the conceptual argument for the pedagogical value of games; our own Education Arcade has been one of a number of academic research projects focused on designing, prototyping, and field testing games for instructional purposes; Hutchinson's focus is on what we can do in our schools right now, using projects already on the market, to tap student and teacher interests in games. In the course of the collection, the models many different conceptual approaches for thinking about games -- including many designed to foster core media literacy skills. The result is a book which will be valuable to classroom teachers or for that matter, parents who want to engage their children in meaningful conversations about the place of games in their lives and about how games structure the way we see the world.

I recently had a chance to interview Hutchison about his goals for this project and wanted to share his responses with you. In explaining the value of games for schools, I often say that "nobody is advocating bringing Grand Theft Auto into the classroom" and go on to point to a broader range of other titles which do seem more appropriate for school use. But Hutchinson makes a fairly compelling argument for why schools should be addressing Grand Theft Auto in the comments which follow. His arguments here is consistent with his perspective that just as traditional media literacy involves learning to think critically about mass media, games literacy has to include asking hard questions of this still emerging medium, questions concerning representations, ideology, and of course, commercial motives.

What motivated you to write this book? Why do you think teachers should be incorporating games more fully into their classroom activities?

I wrote this book in part because I enjoy playing video games myself and I am always looking for synergies between my play time and my work time as a teacher educator and university professor. So too, I was fairly surprised to see that a book like this hadn't yet been written given the long history of video games in American culture. I also couldn't find many video game-centered lesson plans on the Web which also surprised me.

I believe that video games should be referenced in the K-12 classroom for a variety of reasons. First, video games can provide teachers with an effective instructional "hook" since so many students are gamers in their out-of-school lives. Second, many (younger) teachers are also gamers. Through gaming, they have cultivated a knowledge base which can serve them well as part of their pedagogical toolset.

Despite this, most of the teacher-gamers I have spoken with over the last two years see a disconnect between their in-school teaching jobs and their out-of-school gaming activities. It strikes me as nonsensical that so many students and their teachers may be going home at night to play the same games, but then returning to the school the next day with no intention of ever sharing their mutual passion for video games.

I would also say that from a cultural point of view, I see some video games as harbingers of the future. They play with the "world" - past, present, and future - in ways that are impractical (sometimes impossible) in the real world. Some games purposefully bend the laws of physics in exploring new virtual gameplay ideas. Multiplayer video games (and the Internet more generally) experiment with new forms of social organization that go beyond our everyday ways of living.

All of this strikes me as pedagogically interesting and worth studying in K-12 schools.

Some previous books have focused on teaching about games, others on teaching through games, but your book seems to encompass both. What do you see as the advantages of each?

I would say that most of my book treats the "video game" as a cultural artifact that has a history, was created, is used in various ways, and is sometimes discarded for various reasons.

In this sense, I would say that the activities in the book are more focused on teaching using games. I have heard from a few video-games-in-education researchers who see the activities in this book as a good beginning point, but not necessarily the end point of where we need to go in integrating video games into education. To a certain extent, I would agree with this view.

For example, except for a couple of activities, the book does not focus on living life in a virtual community, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. Educating students in Second Life strikes me as teaching through games. But so does learning about military tactics by playing America's Army. James Paul Gee's work gets to heart of how playing video games can transform the learning experience and even supplant traditional ways of teaching and learning in schools.

I would say that my book is more focused on traditional teaching and learning techniques in which the video game is studied as a cultural artifact, rather than "lived through" as an embodied pedagogical experience. Activities which ask students to write a video game review or analyze the leaderboard statistics for a driving game in math class, for example, are fairly approachable by most teachers. They essentially treat the video game as a manipulative that can be utilized as a pedagogical tool by teachers in a wide variety of subject areas.

Your introduction suggests that you see schools as "one of the last remaining formal institutions that can mediate popular culture by examining it closely, holding it to account, and even transforming it at times." What is it about schools which enable them to play this role? What about the argument that schools have historically declared war on popular culture and thus have shown themselves to be anything but objective arbiters of its merits?

This is a phrase that I have also used elsewhere, including my previous book which explores the history of the idea of "place" in education.

I am on purpose expressing something of a idealistic sentiment here that harkens back to the early 20th century promise of a democratic system of public schooling, as articulated most famously by John Dewey and, even earlier, Horace Mann. The basic notion here is that the public school is responsible to the state (which in turn represents the citizenry) and that one of the important roles of the public school is to balance out the decentralized and largely unregulated influence of other social institutions, such as the family, church, private sector, and popular culture. Dewey argued that through purposeful social inquiry guided by the principles of the scientific method, schools could foster in students a democratic impulse that strengthened the social and democratic commons - hence the notion of the "common school."

Today, public schools are bureaucratic institutions that are generally underfunded, used for political fodder by both the right and left, and tasked with an overwhelmingly complex job. Yet schools still remain the last bastion of mandated community involvement in child socialization. As parents and citizens, we count on this bastion to mediate, counter, and offset the unchecked influence of other less formal institutions, such as the peer group, family, and popular culture, by providing a corrective or compensatory measure to a student's education. This role is fraught with difficulty and it is often contested - which is appropriate in a democratic society.

Such corrective or compensatory measures may only sporadically be successful, indeed, sometimes they fail miserably, but I would say that the idealism that schools can continue to play this role is still in place in the eyes of many adults - why else would so many battles continue to be fought over the role and purpose of public schools in American society?

Many teachers might want to "protect" children from exposure to media violence, yet some of your activities ask students to pay close attention to controversial titles, such as Bully or Grand Theft Auto. What do you see as the value of teaching youth to adopt a critical perspective on such games? And what do you say to those who might argue that you are putting them at risk by asking them to engage with these works?

In writing the book, I set it as a goal for myself to incorporate the Grand Theft Auto series into at least one activity. (The "Hot Coffee" controversy was brewing around me as I began writing the book :) The GTA activity I chose tasks students with creating their own kid-friendly open-world game that doesn't include all the adult content we normally associate with games in this franchise.

I also wanted to encourage teachers to deal with controversial ideas related to video games. There are contributed discussion articles in the book that address debates related to video games and violence, video game addiction, gender bias in video games, and health and video games.

My sense is that the book could have been roundly criticized - and rightly so - if I had chosen not to deal with the many criticisms made of video games - for example, that they produce obese layabouts with no social contacts in the real world who are prone to violence and live in a fantasy world 

Discussing the above stereotypes in class is worthwhile in my view. Studying these stereotypes by having students conduct research to test their veracity is even better. There are also activities in the book that aim to help students effect personal lifestyle changes related to their video game playing habits, such as paying close attention to their posture and reducing the amount of time they spend playing video games each week.

It seems to me that there is disconnect between gamers and those critics - Jack Thompson is a popular strawman here - who look at games from outside and see little of value worth highlighting. Since many students are gamers when out-of-school, it makes sense that turning a critical eye toward video games and especially social, medical, and legal commentaries on video games are appropriate topics for study in schools.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab in the News

Chris Kohler ran a story in Wired last week about new academic programs in game studies and design, in which the new Singapore-MIT GAMBIT games innovation lab figured prominently, alongside the new Serious Games masters program being launched by Carrie Heeter at Michigan State University and the new bachelor's degree program in game art and design recently launched by the Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, California. These are to be sure only a few of a much broader array of colleges and universities which currently offer degrees or research opportunities in the area of game studies and design, each with their own strengths and emphasis. Certainly I would want to acknowledge here the pioneering work in this area at the University of Southern California, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, to cite simply the American institutions. Kohler bases his representation of our efforts primarily on an interview he conducted with core participants some months ago. He recently reprinted the full transcript of the exchange via his blog and I am crossposting it here with his permission in hopes that it will give my regular readers a clearer picture of what we are trying to accomplish.

Kohler was flattering in his representation of "Prof. Jenkins" (that guy again!) as the key figure behind the project but in fairness, I should stress the degree to which CMS co-director William Uricchio has been the primary player in our negotiation to create the lab and that the day to day operations of the lab are being capably overseen at this point by CMS alum Philip Tan, who has been seconded to our team from the Singapore Media Development Authority. Both Tan and Uricchio play a prominent role in the interview which follows.

We got some thorough ribbing in the fall when we announced that the Lab would be called SMIGIL (Singapore International Games Innovation Lab) and I joked at Serious Games that we were going to change our name to GOLLUM (Games -- Online Learning, Large, Utterly Massive). In the end, we have settled for GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology). While we are still negotiating some final details of the arrangement, we remain optimistic that the lab will launch this summer with our first crop of games prototypes starting to surface in the fall. My trip to Singapore in January was partially focused on identifying collaborators at leading Singaporean institutions who would be working with us on the first round of research.

Chris Kohler: You've been on the front lines of research into video games for quite a long time, but if I understand correctly this is the first big push for CMS into actual work in video game design. Why get into this area of education?

Henry Jenkins: That's a bit of a simplification. I have long been a strong advocate of innovation, creativity, and diversity of games as well as a strong supporter of the serious and independent games movements. That's probably the part of my work which has been most visible beyond the MIT campus. But, we have been taking steady steps over the past eight or nine years through the Comparative Media Studies Program to move decisively towards games production. The Comparative Media Studies has embraced an ethos of applied humanities.

Some years ago, CMS collaborated with Bing Gordon to develop a Creative Leaders Program for Electronic Arts: our faculty and students sat down to brainstorm with key EA designers, including Will Wright, Neil Young, and Danny Bilson, about the future of the games medium. For the past seven years, we have run a week-long intensive games design workshop every January in collaboration with people in the training program at Sony Imageworks and with a range of local Boston area games companies. Our students conceptualize and pitch games in the course of the week and receive feedback from industry insiders (representing companies such as Harmonix, Mad Doc, and Turbine). We have gradually built on that foundation by having games-related courses taught on campus by games industry insiders, such as Christopher Weaver (Bethesda Softworks), Ian Lane Davis (Mad Doc), Eric Zimmerman (GameLab) and Frank Espinoza (Warner Brothers). We have a long tradition of bringing games industry professionals to MIT to mentor and advise students on their class projects. We have long brought game designers of all kinds to campus to interact with our students

and share with them front line perspectives on industry trends. We have had a steady stream of students who have sought to combine computer science and comparative media studies and have gone on to do internships and get jobs as game designers.

We have now six years of track record doing conceptual and playable prototypes for educational games -- starting with the Games to Teach project which was funded by Microsoft Research and then the Education Arcade, which has hosted major events on games and learning at E3. This group has experimented with the use of game mods as a platform for developing educational games, transforming Neverwinter Nights into Revolution, a game set in Colonial Williamsburg. We recently hired Scot Osterweil (The Zoombini's Logical Adventure) to head up a team of our students working with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision to develop Labyrinth, a multiplatform experience designed to help kids develop literacy and math skills. It will be, we hope, the first CMS developed game to find its way into distribution. Eric Klopfer, another colleague, has been a leading researcher working on Augmented Reality Games and Beth Coleman, yet another colleague, is doing important work on the use of machinema for artistic expression.

All of this is the focus on the work we are doing through the Comparative Media studies Program. But what's great about this initiative is that within MIT, we are partnering with some key faculty in the Computer Science Program who has been doing groundbreaking work in computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition.

And beyond that, we will be working with leading researchers from a range of Singaporean institutions with a broad range of production, animation, and programming skills.

Chris: How did the collaboration with the Singapore government come about? Had you

worked together on any other initiatives prior to this?

Philip Tan: Late last year, Singapore announced that the country was embarking on a major effort to grow R&D spending to 3% of its GDP. This is a crucial direction for preparing the Singapore economy for the next couple of decades. They've been focusing on biotech for a good few years and they've had compelling domestic reasons to build up their environmental and water technologies. However, the government also announced a big commitment to Interactive and Digital Media as a research space that is simply too important to ignore.

[Added later: I mixed up some statistics in the paragraph quoted (above). The National Research Foundation of Singapore announced that they would allocate S$500 million over the next five years for a strategic research program to increase the value-added contribution from the interactive & digital media (IDM) sector from S$3.8 billion in 2003 to S$10 billion, and to create about 10,000 new jobs by 2015.

The Media21 blueprint of MDA, which was announced in 2003, aims to double the GDP contribution of the entire media industry to 3%, and to increase the number of media industry jobs.

Thanks for the opportunity to clarify this detail.]

Given Singapore's technological base, excellent education system, cosmopolitan influences, and constraints in population and geographical size, the country has already been investing heavily in its digital media industries. This announcement is important as it encourages a bigger push towards addressing the concerns of the Singapore industry through R&D, which necessitates an attitude of risk-taking and creativity. They're building on that strong IT base that they've developed over the past 25 years, but they also recognize that digital media has significant creative challenges in addition to technological complexity. This effort invites exploration into new business models, cultural explorations, and aesthetics, which now becomes an integral part of the R&D effort for Interactive and Digital Media.

For the past 8 years, MIT and Singapore have had an ongoing collaboration called the "Singapore-MIT Alliance." The trust and understanding between MIT and Singapore institutes of higher learning has grown during that time, which has made it easier for researchers and educators to build collaborations. Within this context, CMS has been looking for an opportunity to work with Singapore in various media-related initiatives, and CMS is still examining other potential collaborations, particularly in education. However, just as the rapid growth of the Singapore industry is beginning to uncover challenges and opportunities for research, CMS has been gradually expanding its game curriculum offerings and research endeavors, so the International Game Lab is just the right project at the right time for all the collaborators.

Chris: What exactly is the involvement with Singapore -- will they be sending a certain number of students to MIT every year? Undergrad or graduate or both? How will you be involving working game industry professionals in the Lab? Have you signed up any specific individuals who you could name?

Philip Tan: Singapore and MIT faculty, post-doc, and graduate students will be collaborating on research across a range of different game-related topics. We want to make sure that this is completely collaborative; the research thrusts need to make sense both all the researchers, drawing on strengths and interests of both Singapore and MIT collaborators. Without that complementary benefit, we would end up compromising the full effectiveness of the initiative. There will naturally be a lot of communication, researcher exchanges, and joint presentations, and we should expect to see simultaneous increases in research activity in MIT and in Singapore institutions.

Undergraduate and polytechnic students in Singapore already have access to pretty strong technical and creative curricula to prepare them for game careers, so we want to bring 30 to 40 a year to MIT and challenge them to take the results of the ongoing research efforts and translate those ideas and applications into playable games. We'll also help build up further opportunities for more industry-bound students to grapple with the research while they are in Singapore. Not only does this expose students to game technologies, practices, and concepts that are a little different from the standard development pipelines, it allows the initiative to assess the relevance of the research. If we can't even figure out how to apply our own research to our own games, then some reevaluation is in order.

We'll also have Singapore and US industry professionals attached and visiting the work occurring in Singapore and MIT to make sure that the research stays relevant and accessible to the industry. We're still interviewing and discussing possible means of collaboration, so we can't name names at this stage. In Singapore, the local IGDA chapter makes it a priority to collect input and speak for the concerns of the industry, so we will frequently be consulting with them to identify areas of research that might be beneficial for the industry but might potentially be too risky for the industry to undertake.

Chris: More generally, how will this affect MIT's student body? Say I'm an undergraduate at MIT with a strong interest in game design or game research -- how could I get involved in this program?

William Uricchio: The Lab provides us with an opportunity to redouble our efforts in the classroom, research lab, and outreach programs. Each of these venues offers our students ways of sharing in the benefits of the program. In the classroom, the presence of the Lab will not only allow us to increase our game-related course offerings, but should facilitate greater interaction among CMS students and those from other parts of the Institute such as Course 6

(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Sloan. There will be plenty of games-related research opportunities throughout the year in direct support of the Lab. MIT has a strong tradition of involving undergraduates as active participants in applied research through its many labs -- a program called the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program or UROP. And our already active engagement of key figures in the games field, whether from the industry, or the journalistic or academic worlds, will intensify. The MIT community can look forward to more opportunities to interact with these 'key figures' through our weekly colloquia and occasional conferences, and even through our visiting scholars program. It goes without saying that we very much look forward to drawing upon the experiences and cultural perspectives of visiting Singapore students, using this as an opportunity to challenge some of our assumptions

about game play and the cultural specificities of the medium.

Chris: You talked about earlier and the press release mentions the "development of publicly distributable games". I'm especially interested in the idea that game publishers might be able to work with you to actually get the rights to the prototypes produced by the lab and work them into full games. Can you talk more about this?

Philip Tan: The game industry isn't particularly fond of reading research papers from academia, for a variety of reasons. They're dry, they're overly general, they don't necessarily consider market pressures, and they either discuss concepts that require technology that's still five or ten years from mass-market adoption or obsess over game play and ideas that are considered to be already dated and thoroughly explored by the industry.

Even if the International Game Lab puts out relevant, useful research, or reexamines old ideas to address new audiences, it needs to be communicated to the industry in a way that emphasizes its relevance and applicability. Naturally, the industry pays attention to games. A small, obscure game with a good idea can easily get noticed, highlighted in forums and industry press, played, and critiqued. That kind of close attention expands further if the game is available for online download, and we can then get direct feedback about how good the game and the idea really is. As a side effect, we'll also have to keep in mind the kinds of issues that game developers face every day: platform limitations, tight deadlines, player demographics, and bug patches.

We're challenging ourselves to actually make games that will be designed around the core ideas of the research from the initiative. And by taking them to publishers, we want to raise the bar of how game projects from academia will be judged. Some of them won't get picked up, so we'll just make them publicly downloadable as experiments. But if we can get them into retail channels, we now have a real metric to assess how successful the idea is, and we will have real pressure to work on ideas that actually make better games. For a student, being part of the Game Lab means you has an additional opportunity to graduate with a commercial product in your portfolio.

We're not under the illusion that we're going to be able to compete against triple-A, commercial off-the-shelf games. However, in the online digital distribution space, there appears to be a real market for the small, niche title with a good idea. We also want to be producing a lot of games, somewhere between 5 and 10 games each year. You can't really guarantee a hit in this industry; certainly not with our budgets. You can have all the production values and ideas, but the market can just choose to look the other way sometimes.

Chris: What do you feel needs fixing about the video game design process in general? In other words, what will the Lab do that the video game industry is currently failing to? I feel like truly innovative and groundbreaking great game ideas get squashed often because the powers that be are just looking for things that are marketable -- am I on the right track, or missing the point?

Henry Jenkins: The games industry emerged from the entrepreneurial energies of garage-based designers who were driven by their passions and who created, in a relatively short time, a powerfully expressive medium. We have now seen that initial entrepreneurial stage give way to a much more standardized, studio-based mode of production, based on bottom line calculations and reliable returns of investments, and pushed more and more towards franchise-based entertainment. Studio-based production, across all media, has had two effects: insuring a relatively high standard of production and capping opportunities for innovation and individual expression. As the costs of games get pushed higher and higher, many wonder where fresh new ideas will come from. Some have said that the games industry has become so risk adverse that only a Miyamoto or a Wright can break through the formulas and generate truly original approaches to game design. Many observers have said we need to step outside of that system and provide some place where interesting new game prototypes can be incubated.

We see university-based game labs as one model for how we can foster greater innovation. Much as university-based film production programs have been the place where fresh new filmmakers acquire their skills and do work that stretches the medium(helping to fuel the independent film movement), university-based games programs can be the place where the next generation of game designers stretch the medium (helping to fuel the emerging independent games movement). We see the lab as a space where we can move swiftly from pure research into compelling applications and then partner with the games industry to bring the best ideas to emerge to market.

Chris: What would be an example of a typical research project that the Lab might work on?

Philip Tan: We have six research categories and we expect many projects would

straddle multiple categories: technology, business, genres, culture, aesthetics, and mechanics. For instance, a culture project may examine several demographics and identify an underserved, potential audience, but reaching that audience may involve the creation of a new game genre, a drastically different aesthetic from current offerings, or altering game play mechanics to keep them engaging and accessible. You also need to figure out how to get that game into the hands of that audience, and possibly alter your pipeline to bring the cost of development under the projected returns from that audience. Finally, we build that game, scaled within our capabilities, and we test it all out for real.

Chris: Is the intent here mostly to work with established MIT researchers to produce papers and game designs, or are you hoping to get students involved at the undergrad or graduate levels who want to go into the game industry? If the latter is a part of the effort, how would you compare the Lab to other game design programs?

William Uricchio: The short answer is yes! yes! We certainly want to make the most of the established research talent that we have in house, and to intensify our research and creative collaborations with leading figures in the field. But doing so also implies that we continue to do what we do best: drawing on our extremely able student body in a collaborative research process. Their game experience is formidable, their ability to think outside the box well proven, and I can't think of a better educational strategy than working together to develop the future of the medium. We have had a steady stream of graduate and undergraduate students leave MIT and succeed in the industry, and see no reason to stop now! But we also hope that this initiative leads to innovations that, while game-centric, offer students opportunities to work with the medium in unexpected ways, ways that go beyond today's established industry.

Chris: Continuing that thread, what do you think is wrong with the current state of game design education? There is no shortage of colleges and universities that offer bachelor's or even master's degrees in game design, but... are they on the right track to continue innovation in the medium, or are they just churning out worker bees?

Henry Jenkins: I am not sure I think anything is wrong with the current state of game design education. We aren't doing this because other university programs are failing. Each of the existing programs fills a specific niche: some emphasize technical innovation, others character design and world building; some move fairly swiftly into games industry positions while others emphasize the development of an independent games aesthetic or are more closely aligned

with the serious games movement. We hope to add several things to the mix:

first, we want to get our students working in an international production context, fostering greater collaboration between the American and Asian games industries. More and more games are a global medium with many new countries developing games industry. As they are doing so, we are seeing more and more culturally distinctive games enter the marketplace. At one time, games seemed to have a global style, which sought to erase local cultural differences. Now, we are seeing different cultures explore different game genres, themes, and

styles. We think the next generation of game designers will need to be able to communicate in a global context and be able to appreciate and value the cultural diversity that characterizes current game production.

Second, we see real value in pushing forward games as a medium through a combination of cutting-edge research and imaginative applications. In that regard, strength of our program is that we teach students to think across media -- sometimes becoming more aware of commonalities and relationships between multiple media traditions, sometimes drilling down to what is distinctive about a particular medium. We are a program in Comparative Media Studies and not one that specializes exclusively in Games Studies or Game Design per se. This perspective has sometimes been misunderstood as the field gets bogged down in pointless debates about narratologists vs. ludologists. We see narratives and game play both as traditions that cut across multiple media channels and seek to help students develop a more integrated approach to thinking about the social and cultural potentials of each medium. With this project, we are bringing together researchers who understand games from a social and cultural perspective with those who are doing groundbreaking research on new media technologies. We see games as an important medium of expression for the 21st century: we are not just preparing young people to enter the games industry; we are challenging the games industry to think about their medium in new ways; we are daring people to imagine games that do things they have never thought of before.

The Beatles Win the IAP Games Competition

A few weeks ago, I shared with readers of this blog some of the thinking behind our annual workshop on translating traditional media content into interactive entertainment experiences. This is a workshop we have done for the past seven years in collaboration with Sande Scordes from Sony Imageworks. Students with different skills and backgrounds are put onto teams together and asked to select an existing media property that they think would form the basis for a compelling game experience. In the course of the week, these teams think through issues of narrative structure, character development, graphic presentation, interactivity, audio design, market potentials, and business models to come up with a 20 minute "pitch" for how and why they think such a game might succeed. The students worked long, long, long hours trying to pull together their presentations and on Friday, they gave their pitches and got feedback from our panel of judges (which combine industry and academic expertise). Every year, we get blown away by the quality of the presentations and this year was no exception.

The winning team this year, led by CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby and including Cabell Gathman, Ben Decker, Sarah Sperry and Laura Boylan, imagined a unique partnership between Apple Music (which owns the rights to the Beatles's songs and likenesses) and the Nintendo Wii (which offers an exciting platform for a new kind of games/music experience). The presentation opened with a montage of clips designed to display the unique sense of humor and comradary that one associates with the classic Beatles movies, the game like potential of some of the sequences from Help and A Hard Day's Night, and the ways that the Beatles themselves had experimented with the construction of animated avatars through the Yellow Submarine and other projects. Their high concept -- "Grand Theft Auto meets the Fab Four" -- a "sandbox" game experience which allows players to take on the role of the Beatle of their choice. As they explained, people have strong feelings about which Beatle they want to be and might not take kindly to starting out the game as Ringo and working their way "up" to John or Paul. They might also have strong feelings about which period of the Beatles' lives they wanted to inhabit or preferences about which of the many imaginative realms introduced through their songs they might want to visit first.

The Wii would allow novel play mechanics which might range from trying to "net" the Blue Meanies or deliver flowers to "all of the lonely people" to performing as a band -- they even imagined a level which might be called "Sitar Hero" which reflects a particular memorable moment in the group's development. Periodically, the player might be besieged by mobs of screaming fans that rip off their clothes and delay their movement through the levels. As they successfully complete a level, they would get to perform another hit song from the group's repertoire and they might be able to enter a more surreal, psychedelic realm such as the Octopus's Garden or Lucy in the Sky with Gardens. Each level starts with a muted palette designed to mimic the black and white of their classic films but as the Beatles master the challenges and spread love through their music, they color our world.

The group's witty presentation was peppered with a range of compelling slogans -- "All YOU need is Love. Wii provide the rest" or "Let it Wii." They even were able to offer some convincing arguments that this project might not be as far fetched as it might seem, given Apple's recent venture in allowing Cirque du Soleil to repurpose and remix classic Beatles cuts for their new performance piece.

And if anyone wondered what the Fab Four would look like as game characters, they ended with a series of Beatles Mii (see above) that drew their inspiration from their previous embodiments in animation.

Another team, headed by CMS graduate student Orit Kuritsky, tackled the challenge of converting the classic television series, The Twilight Zone, into a new kind of psychologically inflected Survival Horror title, partnering with Buena Vista Games. Disney has made a good deal of money off of the Twilight Zone attraction at their various amusement parks worldwide, while the rights to the Rod Sterling series belong to CBS. The game would include the figure of the narrator, modeled in Sterling's likeness, who provides unreliable and sometimes wickedly witty guidance to the player by stepping outside the action and providing comments on his/her fate. The game tried to capture the film noir look and feel of the classic series while taking advantage of the potential of digital media to create distorting and disorienting representations of architectural space. Like the classic series, which drew heavily on classic short stories and original works by top flight genre writers, the episodic content of the game would be developed by contemporary masters of fantasy, suspense, horror, and science fiction, including Michael Resnick and Carol Emshwiller, while music would be provided by Masami Ueda, the composer behind the Resident Evil and Okami games.

The doors (famous from the opening credits) would provide portals into different game worlds where situations would mix elements familiar from the original series with new elements that reflect the extension of Sterling's social commentary into such contemporary issues as cloning or terrorism. Many elements of the world will be familiar to those who are fans of the series: one can rejuvenate by kicking a can, for example, or one might look outside the window and see a monster on the wing of your airplane, suggesting the creator's affection towards the original, yet new generations of gamers will anticipate twists and surprises around every corner and Disney would expect tie-ins to its ride.

Another team, headed by CMS undergraduate students Chris Casiano and Kenny Peng, asked us to imagine what would happen to the Harry franchise once J. K. Rowling had published the last book in the series. Rowling has hinted that she might not be opposed to further fleshing out the world around Hogwarts even if she doesn't plan to write any more stories about Harry himself and has expressed some disappointment in the quality of the Electronic Arts games based on the films. So, what if they could get J.K. herself to help flesh out the back-story of James Potter and the Marauder's Map -- that is, the story of Harry's father and his classmates. As they noted, the Marauders have been central figures in the fan fiction which has grown up around the Potterverse and the books have provided just enough information to interest even more casual readers in their adventures. In that regard, Harry Potter would not be the first fictional world to use games to broaden the scope of its narrative: they pointed to the success of the Knights of the Old Republic titles in the Star Wars franchise.

Like the Beatle's team, they were drawn to the Wii as a platform which could allow for an immersive player interaction and they offered a spectacular and playful demonstration of how the controller might support the casting of spells, wizard battles, and quiddich matches. They envisioned a cooperative multiplayer game similar in style to the Zelda Twilight Princess game that is already offered for the Wii but based on elements from the Potter books and associated materials (such as the Fantastic Beasts book which Rowling did as a side project). While we all felt fans would have competing ideas at this point about the story of Harry's father and mother, we agreed that Rowling was probably the only person who could flesh out those plot elements in a game and have it maintain a high level of credibility with fans. They imagined if the game was successful it could be the springboard for further sequels which took the Potter family into its fateful confrontation with Voldemort and his legions.

The fourth team, led by CMS graduate student Andres Lombana, proposed a heist game set in a virtual Las Vegas and modeled after the Ocean's 11 movie franchise. They pitched Ubisoft on what they envisioned as a "thinking man's multiplayer game" which built on lessons learned from the Splinter Cell titles about how to create a breaking and entering play mechanic and which might redeploy some of the assets developed for the company's recent Rainbow Six Las Vegas title. Players could be either the thieves trying to rob a major casino or the guards assigned to prevent the robbery from taking place. Guards might have capacities such as the ability to use trained dogs to sniff out identifying residue or lie detectors to determine what statements are false. The movie already provided a range of different character types, each of whom offered their own skills and introduced new play mechanics into the series: the pickpocket, the card shark, the acrobat, the pyrotechnic, the weapons expert, the hacker, and so forth. The thieves have to keep an eye on their suspicion meter let it tip off the guards prematurely; they might be able to diminish suspicion through the use of disguises or by spending more time at the gaming tables (involved in various minigames). The game would preserve the smooth style and bantering dialogue of the original franchise, hopefully drawing in George Clooney and the other members of his brat pack to provide original voice acting for the title. Barring that, they envisioned a lower cost alternative where Julia Roberts led a team of original female characters who were trying to beat the boys at their own game. (Robert is noted to be a hardcore Halo fan, according to some interviews, so the speculation is that she might like to be the protagonist of a game series.)

Front Line Perspective on the Boston Games Jam

Earlier this month, The Education Arcade played host to the first Boston Game Jam. Dan Roy, a CMS master's student, who has been working on the Labrynth project through the Education Arcade and is currently doing his thesis on the models of learning and reward underlying multiplayer game design, offered to share with us some of his perspectives of the event. What follows is his account of what happened when you put a bunch of creative game designers -- both professionals and students -- in a room for a weekend with the goal of testing the limits of their medium. (Personally, I am waiting to see Game Jam turned into a reality series not unlike Project Runway!) Boston Game Jam

by: Dan Roy

It's 9 a.m. on Saturday and about 15 professional video game developers from the Boston area are taking their seats in The Education Arcade lab at MIT. They've come alone or in teams of two for the first annual Boston Game Jam, armed with ideas for games involving the Jam's theme of "shifting." They are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians, and they've committed the next 36 hours of their lives to making experimental games. Though developing games is work and they do it every day, there's something special in the air this Saturday. It's an opportunity to leave behind the pressures of the game industry, with its years-long development cycles, escalating budgets, increasing team sizes and specialization, sequelitis, and publisher-developer tensions.

Once upon a time, a single crackerjack programmer or a team of three could bestow their unique vision of gaming on the world with only a few months of work. Development cycles were short. Genres were undefined. Risk was low and creativity was high. The trend in the ensuing decades has moved away from all of this. We've reached the point as an industry where failure on a project costing tens of millions of dollars means lots of lost jobs and maybe a shuttered business or two. In that environment, publishers rely on proven intellectual property and remaking established genres to meet their quarterly targets. When publishers hold the money and the IP, contracted developers have little choice but to live hand to mouth. One missed milestone or delayed contract could be the end for such a developer with no savings.

In addition to the rising budgets and reduced financial risk-taking, individual employees find themselves working on more and more specialized tasks. This assembly line model stifles a lot of creativity. The benefits of feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself are offset by lack of control over the direction of the project.

And so, these game developers gather at MIT to seize back their creative control. They've come with plans for games they would like to make entirely by themselves. The programmers are no longer just graphics coders or physics coders or tools coders or artificial intelligence coders. They now hold the grand vision of the game, as well is the responsibility for wearing hats normally left to others.

By noon, everyone had settled in with his project and was making steady progress. Max McGuire in particular seemed ahead of the game, as he already had something playful-looking up on his screen. At a game jam, one can always step away from his computer, wander around the room, and become inspired by the ideas and energy of all the other auteurs. A casual observer would notice that screens full of code intermittently give way to intriguing visual representations of progress.

Later in the day, Jam organizer Darius Kazemi warned us that if we didn't have something playable by this evening, we were in bad shape. A couple of teams took this opportunity to step back from their original visions and refocus on something more practical. However, a surprising number of projects were right on track. It seemed we had scoped our projects well to not fall into the common trap of taking on too much.

After dinner, some participants started to call it quits for the day and head home. As the coordinator of the Jam facilities at MIT, I resolved to stay in the lab until everyone was finished. I was quite tired when I walked home at 5 a.m. As most people who have ever been excited about a project can tell you, there are good and bad kinds of sleepy. The energy that I took from the group and from my own creative process had not yet dissipated, and even as I lay in bed exhausted I found my mind eagerly bounding between the possible features I could implement the following day.

That following day began three hours later. In my exhaustion, I must have set my alarm incorrectly, because I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. When I arrived at the lab to punch in the door's security code there was already a line of antsy developers. I felt guilty for standing in the way of their work, even early on a Sunday morning.

As the clock drew closer to the 6 p.m. deadline, the entire room tightened its focus. As time ticked features a way, developers became even more earnest to preserve what they could of their initial visions. You could hear the whir of productivity, punctuated by semi-sarcastic exclamations from Al Reed like, "I just realized I don't know how to program." Kent Quirk and his son/teammate Lincoln also had their moments, like when they both leaned in close to the

screen and simultaneously grunted. "Huh?" and "Hmm."

Darius stopped us all precisely at six, and we gathered around the projector to present the creative gold we had mined all weekend with our pickax keyboards (handy tools, those). Max McGuire had managed to conjure up a respectable competitor to Will Wright's forthcoming game Spore, in which you take creatures from their basest existence through the height of civilization and into outer space. The core mechanic is shifting terrain up and down. Impressive, and as fun to watch as to play.

Eric Rosenbaum and Jonah Elgart created a game around shifting rhythms, redirecting streams of beats to create a symphony or cacophony of precautions and notes. It seems like a great game if I could just figure out how to play it.

Philip Tan, who has been flying back and forth between MIT and Singapore for half a year as he sets up an international game lab called GAMBIT, made a game about jetlag. In it, players must manage passengers' moods so that they're in peak state when they hit the ground (hopefully softly). The whole room had listened earlier in the day as Philip recorded the voiceovers for the flight attendants. It was definitely the fifth take of "Coffee, tea, or soda?" where the humor of the flight attendant's annoyance finally came through.

Kent and Lincoln Quirk made the only 3D game of the Jam, in which players shift an avatar between conveyor belts to reach the center of a maze. The tricky part was that if you stayed on the conveyor belt long enough, you would flip over with it... to the dark side.

Al Reed and Alex Rice somehow overcame Al's inability to program, creating a Mario Brothers type game called Squish in which players hop from platform to platform shoving boxes around in an attempt to crush each other. The only explicitly multiplayer game of the Jam, it clearly showed off the potential of humor in social interactions. The hilarity of watching Al's stick figure accidentally squish itself cannot be denied.

Darius, who had originally planned to not make a game and only assist others, had found himself twiddling his thumbs and cranked out a Game Boy Advance game of shifting mazes.

Darren Torpey and David Ludwig created a game about shifting seasons. They made the executive decision that four seasons was far too many, and unilaterally cut it down to two. Personally, I'll miss fall and spring tremendously and can't condone their actions.

Geoffrey Long and I (Dan Roy) created a game about shifting perceptions around the diamond industry. Conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds, have been used to fuel terrible violence for years, and I wanted to educate some consumers who might be unaware what their purchase might be funding.

Jim Ingraham and Duncan Watt contributed art and sounds respectively to all of the projects, and they did so valiantly in the face of our common and impending deadline. Duncan in particular knows how to triage.

Most of these game concepts would never have been made if not for an environment like the Boston Game Jam. At least, they never would have been made within the industry model that only makes space for AAA titles. However, there are promising signs that at least some segments of the industry are shifting back to smaller teams, smaller budgets, shorter development cycles, and wackier concepts. Digital distribution helps here tremendously, as do content delivery models like episodic. Chris Anderson's Long Tail is just regaining prominence in the game industry, and the "hits" of the future may be niche subscription titles. Henry did a number of posts on the rising independent games movement not too long ago that readers may find interesting.

The mood in the Education Arcade lab after giving our presentations was inspired exhaustion. Everyone agreed that they'd like to do the Jam again, with some calling for it every six months instead of annually. Most participants didn't seem to mind that they had just worked halfway through the Patriots-Colts game, even with New England's team represented. We had just had our own game of realizing our visions, in which we proved ourselves as much as played in the sand. I think I speak for everyone at the Jam when I say we are fortunate to do what we do.

How Computer Games Help Children to Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shaffer (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced blog readers to my former student, David Williamson Shaffer, and his new book, How Computer Games Help Children to Learn. This book is a must read for anyone who is invested in the concept of Serious Games or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what games might contribute to the reform of the educational process. In yesterday's post, he walked us through his roots in Seymore Papert's notion of hard fun and his concept of epistemic games. Here's a bit more background on David taken from his blog:

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

Today, I asked Shaffer some of the hard questions which all of us who are promoting games and education are facing. He offers some candid and compelling responses.

You describe powerful activities which certainly require students to deploy a rich array of school content. But by classical definitions, not all of the activities you describe are games. And many teachers remain resistant to the concept of games in school. So what value do you see in referring to these experiences as games?

This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Part of the problem with the word "game" is that there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. The definition I use in the book is closer to some than others--and as you know, I talk about this very issue and how my use of the term compares to others in the book.

A major point of the book is that digital technologies force us to reexamine and rethink a number of concepts whose original definitions come from an age of print literacy: things like games, learning, thinking, innovation, professionalism, school, and so on. It is an argument that I know you are quite familiar with, since you similarly argue that new media force us to reconceptualize the nature of concepts like production and consumption, genre and medium, and so on.

The argument I make in the book is that in the digital age there is a new set of relations between games and school--and school and learning, professional practices and academic disciplines, innovation and education--and this reorganization of how we think about thinking and learning, play and education, creativity and rigor is an essential step in thinking about the future of learning.

Some skeptics have argued that the serious games movement is imposing a utilitarian logic on play (making it into something serious) when in fact, the value of play as a form of mental recreation may come from the fact that it invites us to suspend real world consequences and constraints. How would you respond to this argument?

I've heard that argument, of course, but honestly I think it is a bit of a straw man. First of all, no one (that I know) is arguing that *all* play should be "serious" in the sense you describe here--that is, devoted to some larger purpose. Second, for all the reasons that Seymour and others (and I) have talked about, there is such a thing as "hard fun"--that is, the fun of doing something difficult but worthwhile. It is an important and legitimate part of fun, and of learning, and of being a well-adjusted and happy person. Finally, and perhaps most important, serious games do suspend some real world consequences and constraints. Any game imposes some constraints and relaxes some, abates some consequences and introduces others. Different games have a different balance, and serve different functions. But I don't think there is some form of pure or idealized play (except as a theoretician's fancy) which games that serve some larger purpose somehow "pollute." Any game is played in some social context, and therefore serves some larger purpose.

Other critics of the serious games movement have argued that we are moving too quickly from ethnographic evidence that some kids learn well through games to larger claims that all youth can/should learn through game play. How would you respond to this argument?

Well, not all the evidence is ethnographic. My work is based on experimental studies: we design a game based on a specific set of hypotheses about what players will learn and how they will learn it; then we study the experiences of players to see whether that's what happens. Others in the field have done similar studies, some at quite large scales.

No one would deny that there has been a lot of enthusiasm in recent months and years about the potential of games, and some claims have no doubt been inflated, or premature, or speculative. But that doesn't mean that all claims are suspect: it depends on the claim and the evidence.

I will say that this form of argument (games for learning are all hype) is a little ironic, in the sense that the other major criticism of games is that they will teach kids the wrong thing: that playing violent games will make them violent, and so forth. We seem to think it is easier to learn bad things than good--which is, at the very least, a very Hobbsian view of the human condition.

I do think that an important part of any game is the context in which it is played. So you can take a good simulation and make it part of a game that leads to the development of useful skills, knowledge, values, and identity in service of a useful way of thinking about the world. You can also set up the conditions of play in such a way that the outcomes are quite different.

So I am skeptical of any claims about what "games" in general do or don't do for kids. That's why my book is titled "HOW computer games help children learn" and not "DO computer games help children learn?" We know that children learn from all of their experiences. The question is whether and how we can design experiences that will help them learn things we think will help them become better citizens, happier individuals, and more productive members of society.

You end your book with some speculations on the future of education. How would schools change -- for the better or for the worse -- if various kinds of game-like activities were to displace some of the activities that currently constitute the "game" of schooling?

I don't know what the ultimate shape of schools will be in the digital age. It took decades to design the modern industrial schools we have now, and they look very different from their predecessors. Schools right now focus on standardized tests of basic facts and skills for a paper and pencil world. They need to become more about learning to use sophisticated technologies to find creative and innovative solutions to real problems. I think well-designed computer games can, should, and ultimately will play a large role in that process. But to get there will mean redesigning almost everything about schools in the long run: the architecture of the buildings, the content of the curriculum, the schedule, and perhaps most important, the means of assessment.

This is going to be a big change, and a big task. But as I argue in the book, wise, well-educated, and affluent parents are already using new technologies to help their kids prepare for life in a complex world. If schools don't keep up, they risk becoming at best a footnote in the real process of education in the digital age, and in the worst case, a road to failure and an impediment to educational opportunity for those who can't afford access to the tools and pedagogies for success in a world of global competition.

Some have argued that we necessarily distort the real world phenomenon we are representing when we reduce them to the structures of a game. Do you agree with this concern? If so, how might educational game designers address it?

As Don Norman points out in his wonderful book Things That Make Us Smart any representation of reality is a simplification, leaving out details that are not relevant to solving a particular problem or accomplishing a particular task. Moreover, all of our thinking takes place through representations--whether external representations like diagrams, pictures, or spreadsheets, or internal ones, such as memories, words, or images.

So all thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality in this sense.

The power of epistemic games is that they are based on a specific theory of how you determine what it is safe to leave out in designing a game that models professional training as a way of teaching innovative thinking. The book describes that process in more detail, but the specifics aside, the point is that epistemic games are based on a specific pedagogical theory--a theory about what is worth learning and how people learn it.

There are other theories one might use, of course. But in the end, I think that any good educational game has to be based on a corresponding theory of how learning takes place. The theory might work or not--which is why we test the games we build. But it is that theory that tells you which simplifications you have to make (and which ones you can not make) in re-presenting real world phenomena in game form.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

The Sony Game Design Workshop

For those of you following my travels, I am now back in the United States (San Francisco to be precise) where I will be through tuesday. Further legs on this trip take me to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Durham, and New York City, before returning in Boston for the start of the term. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scordose from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

Here's the basic details:

Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age

Prof. Henry Jenkins, Sande Scoredos and Thomas Hershey, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Mon Jan 29 thru Thu Feb 1, 10am-05:00pm, 14E-310

Fri Feb 2, 10am-05:00pm, 2-105

Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)

Signup by: 10-Jan-2007

Limited to 40 participants.

Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)

Prereq: None

Student teams develop story concepts for various media, including motion picture visual effects and computer games. Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), this non-technical activity focuses on the theoretical, historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic elements of interactive narrative and game structures. Morning lectures explore linear and non-linear storytelling across media, audio-visual elements, game theory, and techniques to increase the depth of interactive console games and enhance storytelling. Afternoons run as workshops where participants collaborate in teams to design interactive story scenarios to be presented during a final session on Friday afternoon.

Held in 14E-310. Friday February 2nd will be held in 2-105.

Contact: Generoso Fierro, 14N-207, x3-5038, generoso@mit.edu

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants though there are limits to how many people we can absorb.

The following text is taken from a teacher's guide for the workshop which currently resides on the Education Arcade website. Parts of it have previously appeared in Telemedium. We have also produced a series of reality television style short documentaries showing the process at work and displaying highlights from the final presentations. And we have notes from some of the key lectures during one year's run of the workshop. These are all designed to encourage teachers at other institutions to try their own hands at conducting this kind of workshop process.

The workshop has two basic components - a design competition where teams conceptualize and present their approaches to adopting an existing media property into a game and a series of lectures designed to provide them with the background knowledge they need to complete this task. The contest provides greater motivation for students to pay attention to the information presented through the lectures and to apply it to the specific challenges of conceptualizing their games.

Some aspects of the workshop take advantage of the unique resources of MIT, yet we believe that the basic structure of the workshop could be adopted by local teachers at the high school level. We have had several high school aged students in the past and they have done as well or better than their older counterparts. In any case, the content of the workshop has adjusted slightly each year to reflect the available faculty and their interests.

Educational Goals

This workshop emerged from a series of conversations that Henry Jenkins and Alex Chisholm had with more than 50 different companies, large and small, which might be interested in hiring Humanities-trained media studies students upon their graduation. We were consistently told that while Liberal Arts students are highly desired by employers because of their mental flexibility and breadth of background knowledge, they often lacked some core skills that would make them ideal employees. Among those things most often identified were leadership experience, teamwork, communication skills, brainstorming and problem solving skills, competitiveness, and the experience of carrying a project through to completion. So, one important thrust of the workshop was to give our own graduate and undergraduate students training and experience in these areas.

Team leaders are selected from our own graduate students or undergraduate majors. In the case of a high school, they could be selected from upperclassman and (after the first year) students who had performed well in the previous competition. These students are given some additional training in leadership, brainstorming, and communication skills so that they can insure the success of the workshop as a whole.

At the same time, the workshop was designed to expose students to the basic building blocks of computer and video games - introducing them to current industry trends, technological opportunities of the current game systems, the tools the industry uses to select and develop potential properties - storytelling, genre, character, emotion, space, game play, community building, violence and ethics, gender and generational factors, visual elements, and sound track. Students are introduced to these ideas through the lectures and then apply them to their team projects. The judging criteria for the competition are designed to insure that all of the key concepts get applied.

A third educational goal here involves encouraging students to analyze the key components of an existing media text. Students need to think deeply about what aspects of those texts are essential to defining the 'world' of the story and to insure the audience's recognition and pleasure. Any adaptation involves maintaining certain core features while changing other nonessential features to reflect the specific nature of the medium in which the work is being presented and increasingly, to offer consumers an expanded experience of the 'world' of the story. One reason why we ask students to work with existing properties is that this workshop is designed to foster the analytic skills that we introduce to students through our existing courses on film, literature, or television.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the several dozen teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We typically select graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times.

At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.

The Presentations

The teams have 30 minutes to present their material, 10 minutes to dress the stage, and 10 minutes to respond to the judges' questions. We keep a tight time clock to insure fairness to all involved. The teams have to be well organized in order to get themselves into position by the start of the time and to stay on schedule so that all aspects of their presentation can be heard within the allotted time. We have certainly had teams who fell behind and the team leader had to make decisions on the fly about what should/could be cut in order to get the key ideas into the time. Ideas that don't get presented aren't considered by the judges even if the judges have heard them at earlier points in the process, since the judges have no way of knowing what changes might have been made in the last minute preparations for the presentations. No matter how many times you review the projects, there are always surprising elements in the final presentations as the projects only take their final shape the night before.

The order of the presentations is chosen by drawing slips of paper the day before. Everyone comes into the day knowing when their team will present and what the ground rules are for the presentation.

All participants in the competition have to be in place at the start of the first presentation and no further work can be done once the first presentation begins. All participants hear all presentations. The other teams are pushed out of the room momentarily when the judges ask their questions. Clearly, even with this precaution, later groups have some advantage since they can absorb information into their oral presentation, even if they don't adopt it into their visual materials. But, there have really never been any complaints about unfairness here.

As the competition has continued, the quality and elaborateness of presentations has grown each year. We find consistently that showmanship counts for a great deal in terms of the relative merits of presentations. Groups have become more theatrical. For example, it is very common for participants to create and wear costumes that help to establish the characters contained within their game. These costumes range from glitter rock garb for a Making the Band project to Purple Hats and capes for Willy Wonka. Very often, they will dress the stage with elements that evoke the atmosphere of the story world. For Spirited Away, they created the look of a Japanese bathhouse. Several times, we have had teams use puppets to communicate their ideas. One memorable presentation on Princess Smartypants included both a puppet imitating the regal voice of a princess and a man dressed up like a fairy. Given the technical skills of MIT students, it will not be surprising to learn that they build power point presentations, which can contain very elaborate mock-ups done in Photoshop or flash of what the actual game might look like.

Sometimes, there are very elaborate computer animations that help communicate the core premise. A group focused on Survivor had animations of cracking fires on laptops arranged around the room. The 1984 team, which won last year, turned a video camera on the audience and projected live feed on the wall so the judges and audience had the uncomfortable experience of watching themselves watching the presentation.

More and more students provide give-aways to the judges: one year, for example, a Matrix team provided a gold box with a red and blue sugar pill, asking us to decide which one we would take. Another group, working on Homer's The Odyssey, offered us bottles of root beer with a label designed to imitate the culture of ancient Greece. Some groups mimic the advertising materials or box designs for their products, even going so far as to give us blank CDs in jewel cases mocked up to look like the finished product. For a Fugitive project, each judge was given a 'wanted' poster with his or her own image on it. The groups frequently use music to communicate the audio design of their projects - in most cases, songs sampled from existing CDs, but in a few cases, original compositions the students created for the occasion.

The judges strive to separate out flash which is simply flash from elements carefully chosen to communicate the core elements of the concept and make it come alive for the audience. If there is no serious thinking behind the performance, it can upstage rather than compliment the other elements of the presentation. Throughout the contest, the students are ask to distill down the core features which most be present in order to allow their new product to fit coherently within the existing media franchise. Here is their chance to show you how fully they have achieved that goal. Yet, students need to be aware of the importance of underlying what aspects of the performance are in the game and why. Often, students will play interesting music throughout the presentation but not talk explicitly about sound design elements in their pitch.

We now ask the groups to identify a specific audience to which they are pitching the game. This element requires the groups to do their homework on the different companies which produce games, their connections with other media companies, their existing product lines and preferences, the core market to which they are addressing the bulk of their products, and any notable successes or failures which might impact how they think about your particular product. The group working on Spirited Away, for example, chose to address the Japanese branch of Sony, opening with an extended greeting in Japanese, and drawing on what they knew about protocol and business practices in that culture. Most of the information students need to know about the business can be found on the web.

Students search for games that may be similar to what they are proposing and need to know how well they did and what markets they reached. They can find this by reviewing the large number of games-related websites produced by fans, industry insiders, or journalists. They may look up the property that they are drawing upon to conceive the game to see who produced it, how well it did at the box office, and what other connections may exist between the production company and a games-related company. They may look at other games linked to that studio's properties to see which games companies developed and released them. Those with more business interests can look for trends through industry-oriented publications, which might make the company more or less receptive to the kind of game proposed.

When we first started the competition, these business aspects took a back seat to the more aesthetic dimensions of the presentations, but in recent years, we have attracted more and more management students interested in getting into creative industries. The teacher may need to assess her or his own students to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie and decide how much emphasis to place on this aspect of the presentations. Some focus on the industry, however, seems desirable as a way to help students understand the economic contexts in which creative decisions get made (including the impact of concentration of ownership on the current media environment); this focus on factual information also gives incentive for students to work on their research skills and especially their web searching skills, since this up to the minute information is not going to be found in books.

The goal of the pitch is to put together the key elements of the game in a way that is compelling for the audience. Everything students know about presentation skills comes into play during this part of the process. Students need to think about the ordering of elements - so that the information makes sense to the audience as they are hearing it, so that the most compelling elements get the proper degree of attention, and so that the closing drives home the core elements with an extra persuasiveness. The groups need to make sure that they address each of the elements they will be judged upon while not getting bogged down in local details to such a degree that the judges do not get a clear sense of the game as a whole.

Frequently, students divide up the roles in their presentation based on their expertise and enthusiasm for different aspects of the product. Often, they also identify someone who is their best "finisher," that is, some one who has strong sales skills who can drive home the final pitch at the end of the presentation. We do not require every participant to speak, since we see the value of students who are uncomfortable in front of groups making contributions on other levels. This is, however, a philosophical question, which teachers need to consider in the context of their own programs. If the goal is to get students to really hone their presentation skills and get experience speaking in front of groups, the desire to have every student participate in the presentation is greater than if your goal is to focus on brainstorming and conceptual skills.

The presentations are a time for all team members to drop disagreements and work towards the common good. Often, team leaders instruct participants not to contradict each other during the presentation. If a team member gets hit with a question for which they are unprepared, he or she should make up an answer consistent with the overall approach they are taking and then subsequent team members will need to factor that answer into what they say about the game. One year, we had a group which totally failed to reach a consensus to the point that one group member disagreed about the order in which the PowerPoint slides should be presented and kept flicking back and forth throughout the presentation in a distracting fashion, upstaging and confusing his team mates. Needless to say, this group did badly in the competition and much anger was directed against him after they got off stage.

Judging The Presentations

We recommend having 5 or 6 judges, since each judge will see the presentations in slightly different ways and will focus on somewhat different elements. Having a broad based group of judges helps to take the pressure off any one participant and helps to even out any potential biases the judge may feel towards one group or participant. The judges are given a score sheet. We have established ten criteria of evaluation, which are known by the participants in advance. For each category, the judge gives a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Each judge keeps a running tally throughout the day and reserves the right to adjust scores upwards or downwards as they hear subsequent presentations. Judges often have to rethink their responses to the first few presentations, in particular, since they do not have a very clear baseline of expectations at the start of the day. Each group must be judged by every criterion, which means that they may lower their score significantly if they do not directly address one or another aspect. For some reason, students typically offer much more on game play, narrative, and visual design than they do on sound design.

The judges should set their own standards for each category. As long as they are consistent in applying those standards to each group, then their numbers will be correctly weighted in the final score. It doesn't matter if one judge is strict and another lenient since in the end, it is the total score across all of the judges which we use to weigh the teams. But those judges who are too generous in their grading need to realize that they are flattening out the distinctions between the teams.

In our process, we tally the scores to get a straw poll vote of where the judges have aligned themselves. The judges are often surprised by their own overall scores on the different projects. Subjectively, we will weigh some elements more than others in forming our overall impressions of the team. But if we weigh each element equally, we may find a team did better overall without being the best in any particular category. Once we have a set of scores, we then discuss the presentations to make sure we are fully comfortable with where the collective tally breaks. In some cases, we end up with two teams, which are only a few points apart in scoring, well within the margin of error, and we have occasionally had absolute ties on the first stage of the scoring. Talking through the presentations may help us appreciate things we missed the first time through or think more deeply about potential problems in the team's approach. We often will then recalibrate our scores and retally the results.

Another reason why you always discuss the projects among the judges is because ultimately, we see winning and losing the competition as less important than the critique we are able to provide to each team on its work. Talking it through helps us to identify high and low points on each presentation, which will be discussed as we critique their work. Often, we will give secondary awards which foreground what we see as the biggest strength of each presentation, so that each team has some kind of moral victory in the final presentation. So, for example, we may take each of the criteria and decide which team performed best on each, giving out recognition for best visual design, most faithful to the original content, or most innovative approach to narrative.

When the students come back into the room, we go through each group in order offering our critiques of their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, one tries to be tactful in describing flaws in the presentations but we also feel it is important for all participants to have a sense of how the judges responded to each presentation. Doing the critiques first keeps students focused on what we are saying since they are looking for clues into which group may have pleased the judges the most. Usually, we have one judge designated to lead the critique of each group with the others jumping in as needed to elaborate on key points. It is important for the students to hear how a range of different judges with different types of expertise and backgrounds responded to their projects.

Typically, we spend 5-10 minutes on each group; trying to be even in the amount of time we spend on each. At the end of the process, we then announce the superlatives assigned to each group and finally, the ultimate winner of the competition. In the MIT context, because of our association with Sony, each member of the winning team receives some moderately priced electronic gadget. All participants in the process receive a certificate and many years, Sony brings a book or video tied to one of their current releases for each participant. Teachers will need to think about what kind of prize is appropriate for their students - perhaps a gift certificate from a local merchant.

Spelling Bees and Scrabble

Earlier this summer, I posted notice of a podcast featuring Scot Osterweil, the research manager of our Education Arcade initiatives and the creator of the Great Zoobinis game series. There are now two new installments on the web featuring Scott and his work on Zoobinis. This is part of a series focused on the people who are working together at MIT and at Maryland Public Radio on a new initiative called Learning Games to Go. (I recently taped some segments talking about my interests in games and education which will appear at some point down the line). These materials will be of interest to anyone who has been following the discussions here about serious games. One of the most interesting segments in the new podcast with Scott Osterweill includes a comparison between the Spelling Bee and Scrabble as two models for how one might integrate games or contests into the learning process. It helps to distinguish between early edutainment products which had a drill and practice logic and more recent attempts to develop learning games which sees learning as a process of experimentation and exploration:

In a spelling bee, a kid is challenged to memorize a lot of word, there's a fair amount of pressure, and it's kind of grim. If they get a word wrong, the buzzer goes off, they're told they got it wrong, and they are out. There's never a discussion about why they got it wrong, how they could have reasoned about the word to get it right. There's never really much of a discussion about how that word could be used in speech. In fact, the goal for a spelling bee is to learn all sorts of words that you will never use in common speech. Compare that with a game of Scrabble where the kid sits with the letters in front of them and is moving them around, thinking endlessly about all of the different combinations of words and which ones are real. They try to play one and there's a discussion about whether that's a real word or whether that's a real form of the word. Through that process, kids are engaging deeply not just in spelling but in word usage and they're having fun while they are doing it. There's very little penalty for making a mistake. In fact, the game invites kids to take a risk. 'I'll try a word that I think I heard an adult say. I am not sure it is right but if I get it wrong, I am not out of the competition the way I am in a spelling bee.' So a child can play Scrabble and have a lot of fun at it and laugh at it and not even necessarily need to win to feel like they have accomplished something. That's the experience a game can provide a kid in terms of learning.

This comparison really resonated with me. Anyone who has read this blog has no doubt caught me make one or another really awful spelling mistake. I have struggled all of my life with being a bad speller. I still recall some of the humiliation I faced participating in spelling bees in school. I think I would have preferred having my teeth extracted in public rather than being asked to spell words in front of my classmates. The Spelling Bee may be a game but it isn't a fun or motivating game except for those kids who become very good at it. The Spelling Bee is a game where there are clear losers and it is no fun losing. On the other hand, I got to watch my nine year old nephew play Boggle this summer and I was amazed by the pleasure he took in identifying words from the random pile of letters in front of him. He could more than hold his own with players twice his age and I would hear him introduce words that he learned from game play into his conversation, sometimes weeks later. He would drag out the box and want anyone and everyone to play the game with him. I would have been a better speller today if my education looked more like Boggle or Scrabble and less like spelling bees.

The podcast does a great job capturing Scott Osterweill's unique perspective on the importance of developing learning games that are fun and motivating, that encourage kids to learn by taking risks and testing out new approaches, and that so engage the imagination that kids end up drawing pictures or writing stories about their avatars. The new set of podcasts also feature students and teachers who have been using his games in their classes as they share their thoughts about the value of a more playful approach to learning. The teachers offer a compelling case for the ways games can be integrated into curricular standards and why it matters that educational games feel like real video games.

Newbie

As I was being interviewed for my segments in the series, I found myself talking with the guy who was interviewing me -- Tom Miller. It turns out that Tom has been so turned on working on this project that he has started playing games himself as a 46 year old and has begun to write his own blog about the experience, designed to help bridge between young gamers and their parents. Here are just a few tidbits from his blog, Newbie:

The whole experience reminds me of last year when my family and I went ice skating at our local rink. I'd skated some as a kid, but it had been years and years. People always say that it just comes back, you know, like riding a bike. Well, it didn't just come back for me. I fell on my behind about a million times. My glasses flew off. It was embarrassing.

As adults, we're supposed to know how to do things. It's hard to mess up in public. My kids, of course, did just fine. I think they wondered what was wrong with me, and we haven't been skating together since then. When I think about this, I get more determined to learn how to play these games. I also think that I should go skating again with my family...

Tom does a good job describing all of the bumps and challenges he encounters learning to think like a gamer. Here he describes what happened when he returned from playing Crazy Machines to confront a real world problem involving similar principles:

The amazing part was later that night when I was working on the sink in our bathroom - typical minor plumbing fix. At first, though, I couldn't figure out the problem. Then all of the sudden it was like I saw the pipes in a new way (really and truly!), and I was able to see how to solve the problem. The amazing part was that I felt like my game-playing earlier in the day had actually helped me trouble-shoot my plumbing issues. It was just coincidental that both activities involved pipes (virtual and otherwise...). It was a neat thing to notice. Maybe these games can help us old folks think a little more clearly and maybe even better. Cool....

He discusses a range of different games -- from Darfur is Dying to The Sims 2, which has caused him more than his share of difficulty:

Playing "The Sims 2" feels a little like being in a foreign country. They all speak in this weird gibberish Esperanto language. My little guy is still starving and he's making very strange sounds - EEEARRRHHHKKKKLLL - or something like that. As you can see, he holds his stomach a lot and points to his mouth, somehow convinced that these gestures will help him in some way....

It's all become more than a little upsetting.

Up until now, I've been trying to just figure out this game without looking at the manual. As I understand it, that's how "the kids" do it. Manual, schmanual. And I'm trying to do it like them. I may have to give in, though. I don't know how much longer I can stand to watch my doppelganger cry in anguish - EEEARRRHHHKKKKLLL!!!

I realize that the whole manual thing has become an issue. I'm like the guy who will drive around for three hours because he won't stop and ask for directions.....

Some days later, Tom was back still trying to figure out what he was doing wrong, suggesting that the problems in the game were really starting to get under his skin:

My wife is concerned that my Sims guy is probably dying (you may remember that when last seen, he was crying in pain because I didn't know how to feed him). Thus far, I've avoided going back to "The Sims 2," though, basically because I stink at it. It's way too hard for me to grasp easily, and I'm not sure that I want to make the effort necessary to learn the game. I guess I don't have to go back to it, except for the fact that I've committed myself to this project - exploring and learning about these games. So I feel like I'd be a failure if I just let it go.

The Sims 2 has become the elephant in the room. And I'm sure enough trying to look the other way.

Yet, as the diary continues, he returns again and again to the game -- as if it were a splinter in his brain -- until he improves. This is a pretty good clue that games can be motivators. How many people go back weeks later to homework problems that baffled them?

Getting Serious About Games...

Hi, guys. You were probably expecting the third installment of my comic book foreign policy series. Sorry. I've fallen behind this weekend and it's going to take me a few more days to pull that together. I decided it was better to do it right than to do it quick. Part of what has me distracted is that Convergence Culture is finally out. And trust me, a new book provides its own distractions. If you are one of the people who've bought the book already, thanks. I look forward to hearing your reactions. If you have questions you'd like to explore, send them to me at henry3@mit.edu and I wil try to cluster them and address them through the blog.

Today, I am sharing with you some thoughts about Serious Games that I wrote Morph, the Media Center Blog late last week. I figure few of you would have seen it there.

I wanted to take this opportunity to respond to Clive Thompson's recent article from the New York Time's art section focused on the serious game movement.

Why Now?

Why are serious games happening now? When I spoke with Clive for the story, I identified a range of factors that were all contributing to the emergence of serious games:

1. The generation that grew up playing computer games in the 1980s are now entering adult responsibilities. They are the ones who are taking on roles as parents, teachers, workers for nonprofits and foundations, and so forth. They have a real appreciation of what has captivated them about this medium; they want to find a way to connect with it through their jobs; and they want to use its power to deliver their messages.

2. There has been a growing body of research suggesting that games may indeed represent a powerful instructional medium; there is also clear signs that the ability to interpret and manipulate simulations is going to be a central skill across a range of academic disciplines.

3. There has been a growth of games studies programs at colleges and universities that are seeking ways to give their students real-world experience conceptualizing, designing, making, and testing games. Historically, university based research explores the roads not taken, taking risks on projects that would not thrive within a commercial environment. So, they are turning their attention towards the development of games that serve pro-social purposes or that document aspects of the real world.

4. A small number of games publishers dominate the entertainment market. Small start up companies realize that they can't compete directly with the Electronic Arts of the world and they have to direct their energies elsewhere. At the moment, their best routes forward come from casual games, mobile games, or serious games.

5. As I suggested in my blog recently, there has also been a political debate about whether games constitute a meaningful form of expression and are therefore protected under the First Amendment. Many of us who work in Serious Games have been looking for ways to expand the rhetorical capacity of the medium in response to moral reformers and judges who have dismissed the concept that games might be a vehicle for exploring ideas.

The serious games movement lies at the intersection of these five factors and often takes shape through collaborations amongst the various groups identified above -- educators, policy makers, nonprofits, foundations, educational reformers, university based training programs, and political activists. Working separately and together, they have begun to develop games that demonstrate some of the far-reaching potential of this medium and working together they have begun to bring those games -- in some cases, simply playable prototypes -- to the attention of the larger public. The serious games movement reflects the idea that a medium can serve many functions and that restricting games to purely an entertainment medium seriously undersells its potential.

An Oxymoron?

The term, serious games, may strike some as an oxymoron. Others worry that in turning real world issues into games, one somehow trivializes the subject matter. Both are somewhat misleading. We accept that films, which are most often an entertainment form, may also serve raise awareness of serious social issues. Games are no different -- though we have to shed our somewhat narrow assumptions about what the medium can do. Part of the problem is that we associate games with fun and in a culture still shaped by its puritan past, fun is seen as the opposite of work or of education.

Instead, serious games advocates prefer to use the concept of engagement. After all, much of the time when we are playing a challenging game, we aren't exactly having fun. It can sometimes be a lot of hard or boring work to push ourselves to the next level. (The same, after all, would be true for other recreational activities, such as playing on a sports team). What makes people continue past the pain or boredom is the fact that they are engaged in a compelling and well defined task. I can be engaged by my work as a professional. I was engaged by my work as a student. Most of us wish our work was more engaging. Games simply transform the process of mastering knowledge or interpreting data into a more engaging activity in part by establishing clearly defined goals and roles.

Roles and Goals

As one of the founders of the MIT Education Arcade, a group that over the past five plus years has been focused on prototyping games for learning, we discovered early on that when we wanted to transform a textbook subject into a game, the first question we had to ask experts in that area was what the information allowed you do. This is a question that rarely gets asked in most traditional education. It's considered bad manners to ask an instructor about the use value of what they are teaching you within most academic disciplines. Yet, games take knowledge which is inert on the page and encourage us to act upon it, to do something with it.

As David Schaffer, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has suggested, it is by acting on that knowledge that we learn certain epistemologies -- certain ways of thinking that are specific to the applied versions of the disciplines we learn in school. We learn to think like a historian, a city planner, or a conflict negotiator. We learn to tackle problems of political redistricting or resource management. By taking on those roles, working with complex simulation and visualization tools, solving problems, confronting challenges, and testing one's ideas through action, one refines one's mental models of the world. This is part of what excites us about the idea of games as a pedagogical medium.

Games may teach us by inviting us to step outside the world and manipulate it like a god -- as is the case with the large number of simulation games, the genre most widely represented within the serious games movement. But games may also invite us inside the characters -- as the old expression goes, we get to walk a mile in their moccasins -- as happens with various role-playing games. One of our primary projects at the Education Arcade was a modestly multiplayer game world, Revolution, where participants assumed the roles of townspeople in Colonial Williamsburg in 1775. They went about their work and family life but they also struggled with some the events and dates that paved the way for rebellion against the crown. Testing this game with players, we asked them to write journals describing their experiences from their character's point of view. What we found was that the students produced a synthesis of information gained through previous history lessons, their own introspections about what it would be to occupy a particular role in society, and their observations of what happened during the game. In some cases, they made powerful discoveries about themselves and the world. One girl, for example, was playing a Loyalist character and went to a political rally where redcoats opened fire on the crowd; her character was killed and this, more than anything else, brought home the nature of political violence -- the sense that there are no bystanders at a riot or a massacre and that once the shooting starts, it may no longer matter what side you were on.

Evaluating Our Work

Clive Thompson introduced a note of skepticism from me and other serious games advocates in the story so it is worth taking a moment to clarify what I was saying. I am fully convinced of the educational value of games. I think many kids already have powerful learning experiences working with existing commercial games. I think we can harness that power to produce even more effective resources for teaching and learning if we bring together expertise on pedagogy with the artistic craft of good game design. These games need to be measured in part by the same criteria we would use to measure any documentary or art film -- do they make people think? do they make expressive use of the media? do they deal with the world with all of its complexity and nuance? Or are they simple minded, pedantic, and propagandistic? These are aesthetic judgments. But the reality is that the people who are pouring money into serious games want results. The educational system demands assessment data. Governments and foundations demand proof that they have made valuable investments and not throw away their money. And if we are not able to produce some concrete results that can be traced back to games-based learning, then some of that funding is going to dry up. At the same time, the small games companies need to show proof to school systems if they are going to adopt their products or to parents if they are going to bring them into their homes. And if they can't convince people to try their products, those companies will not be around tomorrow. My comments were not intended as skepticism about the concept of serious games per se. They were intended to describe the reality that we are all working in as we try to make the case that games can be made to serve serious purposes.

Some people have questioned whether games can adequately represent the complexity of human experience. That's a legitimate question. Let's keep in mind that games are representations. They necessarily distort somethings even as they make other things much clearer to the learner. The same is true of all other systems of representations, including those that we take for granted as part of the educational process -- such as maps, charts, diagrams, dioramas, and the like. The difference is that schools put some time into teaching children to read maps -- less than would be ideal but they at least give lip service to doing so. We should not be using games in schools if we are not prepared to teach children to understand how games represent the reality and how to evaluate the credibility of a game's simulation. Some of the most interesting work right now isn't going to develop serious games; it is going into teaching children how to design and develop their own games or into developing tool kits that will put robust simulation tools into the hands of everyday people. This is where the work on serious games starts to intersect our larger conversation about participatory culture.

As more and more people learn how to make games, games will emerge as yet another form of grassroots media. People will use them to explore a broad range of perspectives on a broad range of issues. And we will see political debates staged not simply within games but between different games that have different biases and positions

Fun vs. Engagement: The Case of the Great Zoombinis

Scott Osterweil came to work with the Comparative Media Studies program a little less than a year ago as the head designer for the work we are doing through the Education Arcade -- primarily focusing on a collaboration we are doing with Maryland Public Television called Learning Games to Go. The Learning Games to Go project will develop handheld and mobile games to help young children master basic math and literacy skills. We were very lucky to get Osterweil to work on this project, since he is an experienced games professional, best known for his work on Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and its sequels. The Zoombinis games came out some years back but still crops up regularly when we ask teachers to identify examples of great educational games.

Osterweil is interviewed for the first of a series of podcasts about the project, which just went up this week.

He addresses throughout the interview what has become one of the most vexing problems in terms of convincing teachers and parents that games can be learning activities -- the fact that games are often, on purpose, fun.

I often have teachers, generally of an "older generation," tell me that it is a bad idea to try to make learning fun because most of the rest of our lives is work and work isn't supposed to be fun. (Such comments make me wonder how these people feel about their jobs but that's another matter). I usually respond that they have little to worry about. If being able to deal with prolonged periods of boredom is a necessary job skill for the future, then our current educational system may be doing a better job preparing kids for their adult lives than most of us imagine.

Scott offers a somewhat more tactful answer here:

When children are deep at play they engage with the fierce, intense attention that we'd like to see them apply to their schoolwork. Interestingly enough, no matter how intent and focused a child is at that play, maybe even grimly determined they may be at that game play, if you asked them afterwards, they will say that they were having fun. So, the fun of game play is not non-stop mirth but rather the fun of engaging of attention that demands a lot of you and rewards that effort. I think most good teachers believe that in the best moments classroom learning can be the same kind of fun. But a game is a moment when the kid gets to have that in spades, when the kid gets to be focused and intent and hardworking and having fun at the same time.

You will note here a shift in emphasis from fun (which in our sometimes still puritanical culture gets defined as the opposite of seriousness) to engagement. We think this is an important distinction. When you play a game, a fair amount of what you end up doing isn't especially fun at the moment. It can be grindwork, not unlike homework, which allows you to master skills or collect materials or put things in their proper place in anticipation of a payoff down the line. The key is that this activity is deeply motivated. You are willing to go through the grindwork because it has a goal or purpose which matters to you. When that happens, you are engaged -- whether we are talking about the engagement many of us find in our professional lives or in the learning process or the engagement which some of us find through playing games. For the current generation, games may represent the best way of tapping that sense of engagement with learning.

As the podcast continues, Osterweil describes how this principle of engagement informed his own design work on the Zoobinis project:

What we did when we started designing Zoobinis was to try to think about our own experience with the mathematics of the game and try to access our own learning of it -- trying to remember what it was like to encounter the subject in school or thinking about how we'd use the subject in our daily lives and try to identify times when we had been playful with the concepts in the past. In fact, most of us when we are trying to master something we find ways to be playful to it and in accessing our own playful approach to the material what we were really doing was finding the game that was inherent in the mathamatics. Instead of putting math in the game, we tried to find the game in the math.

Note here that play re-emerges as part of the ways we noodle with new concepts -- a form of informal, experimental, experiential learning that can sometimes precede formal classroom instructions. I often imagine the teacher coming into class to review the previous night's game play: "Think about level 7. How did you beat it? What was hard about it? Why was it difficult? What tricks did you use to get over it? Here's what you were doing" and then scratching out the formulas on the blackboard. "Now go back and try that level again and see if it gets easier." We see educational games as closely integrated into a more elaborate instructional process. We certainly can learn things by playing games -- and we can learn things independently on our own. Many of us would say that the most important stuff we learned growing up took place outside the classroom. But, we think that learning through games is going to be most powerful when we encounter the content on multiple levels and where informal and formal learning intersect.

Osterweil has a great deal more to say about the thinking which went into making the Zoombinis game such a great success.