Each year, video games offer more challenging and natural experiences, from motion-controlled action to augmented reality. And each year the games are becoming more popular—not only as a form of entertainment but as a medium for education or even as a therapeutic agent for keeping people’s minds sharp. So what lies ahead? In March, DISCOVER and the National Science Foundation gathered a panel of experts at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, to discuss the future of video games. Amos Zeeberg, the managing editor of DISCOVER’s Web site, moderated the wide-ranging conversation (click here for video of the event).
Tiffany Barnes is a computer scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who uses video games as a teaching tool in her college classroom. Jim Bower is a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; he is also the founder of Numedeon, the company that created Whyville, a popular online virtual world where children can play educational games and engage in social activities. Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of the video game developer Maxis, is the executive producer of Spore and many other titles. Anne McLaughlin is an experimental psychologist at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, and the director of the Gains Through Gaming Lab, where she is researching ways in which popular video games can be used to improve elder cognition.
Why have video games become such a pervasive form of entertainment as well as such an enticing tool for education? What is it about the medium that makes it so powerful?
Anne McLaughlin: Play is a very natural place to go for learning experiences. In video games there’s a structure of achievement and reward, and that can be felt in a simulation where you’re trying to understand what the underlying system is, figure out how the gears work, so you can control where the simulation is going. You’re starting to see that more and more, in things like the achievement system that exploded on Xbox Live and has now cropped up in Facebook games. That reward structure makes them different from any other type of activity.
Tiffany Barnes: I think the interaction is the most important part of the games. When I do something in a game and see the effect, that’s where I get to make a new concept, learn something or see something new, explore a curiosity. And that’s the important part that enables learning. There’s not only the motivation of a reward structure, but also an ability to see how other people are doing and compete with them—or maybe cooperate. I think Rock Band is a great example of that, where we can gain more points by everybody’s being in the zone and working together: If someone’s not doing so well, I can rescue him by being really awesome myself.
Lucy Bradshaw: The other thing Rock Band offers is the ability for people of different levels to all play together. I personally would love to see that in more games.
McLaughlin: That’s an excellent point. What I find exciting about the new technology is that it’s blurring the lines between real life and game playing. You can play video games with a cell phone, a computer. I think it’s more and more active. And if you can get generations to interact and be active, well, that seems a lot better than sitting in front of the television.
Bradshaw: Picking up on that, there’s been this wave of communities and MMO [massively multiplayer online] games that take on roles and hierarchical structures. There are mentors who teach other players how to make the games. There are creators, there are modders [who modify existing games]. I mean, the landscape of gamers has changed so dramatically in just the last 3, 5, 10 years because games are looking at the latest technology and utilizing it. There are tweets that come from games: from your characters, from the games themselves, and from the development teams as they make them. There’s an entire social network and platform that Facebook has really adapted.
So is there something fundamentally different about video games that makes them unlike other forms of play?
Jim Bower: We look at this thing and we think it’s new. It’s not. This is something we’ve made in our own image. This thing has flexibility, it’s visual, it’s got auditory, its got an Internet that connects humans together. This is just us.
What are other things primates do? They’re hierarchical, right? They’re social. So what we’re seeing in the evolution of the Internet as well as the gaming/video/whatever-it-is industry is that we’re slowly relearning ourselves. And so, in designing games and play, it turns out play is the core part of how primates learn.
What we’re doing here is trying to capture how humans really learn, how humans really interact, and how humans really build their societies. And in fact it’s not new at all. It’s very old. The problem is, for the last 600 years we’ve been doing it wrong. We haven’t had the technology to do it right.
An early criticism of video games was that they were socially isolating and creatively stifling. Is there any validity to that?
Bradshaw: I don’t think so. If you look at games from the past, kids were really controlling this meta-game of a community of players who interacted with one another and created different roles to play in the meta-game. There were games in which the captains knew the subject matter and they taught other players how to make content or modify things. So I think inherent in video games, and something that we have deliberately built into them, is this ability to extend beyond the box.
Barnes: To the comment that games erase individuality: I think that any person who would say that is playing hardly any games at all. Because not only do we have many different types of games, we are also getting more and more games that can actually help ?you achieve your own goals. We’re starting to have games for exercise, games for meeting other people. You can set your own goals with games now, so they’re just a whole different kind of medium. So someone who says you’re going to lose your individuality with games is just not playing games.
Bower: A very clear trend in the gaming world, and something we set out explicitly to do in Whyville 11 years ago, is to actually involve the individual, allowing you to express yourself and brand yourself with learning. So one of the things you’re seeing, I think, is that smart games—games that involve your actually being able to learn something that gives you an advantage in the social structure —are becoming the more interesting and powerful games. The point is, when games are built assuming that humans have a two-minute attention span, players stay there for about two minutes. The games that drive longer involvement, and The Sims is a good example, are ones that—guess what?—involve your actually having to be intelligent and learn something to play them.