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Can
"Serious Games" Improve Your Mind? |
Posted:
11.28.05
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Long criticized for distracting students from their homework
and fostering violence, some video game designers are now developing
games that help students deal with real-world situations such
as managing the International Space Station or negotiating peace
in the Middle East.
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"Serious games as a concept refers to games that are used
for practical purposes." said Jamil Moledina, the organizer
of the Serious Games Summit, a series of conventions held in the
United States and Europe that bring together developers in the
industry.
Moledina thinks the name is problematic. "That's what's
wrong with the name 'serious games'-- they use the fun element
of a game but in a way that's productive."
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What are
"serious games"? |
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The basic concept behind all video games is to allow the player
to control the events of a particular character and force him
or her to connect and manipulate information to move on to the
next level. Each level is designed to be hard enough to be just
doable, creating simultaneous feelings of pleasure and frustration
that draw people in.
In entertainment games, this could mean learning how to stay
alive in the drug underworld or save a far away planet from an
army of aliens.
Serious games take the same concept a step further by allowing
players to act as problem solvers, political leaders or humanitarian
workers while learning information that might otherwise come from
a textbook or lecture.
"You can go inside the role instead of reading about it
in a book," said Asi Burak, an educational game producer,
at the Serious Games Summit in Washington, D.C.
Burak is part of a team working on PeaceMaker, a game that seeks
to teach high school and college students about the complexities
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of conquest and destruction,
players try to achieve peace and cohabitation -- an arguably much
harder goal. The game should be finished in the spring of 2006
and teachers are already asking for copies to use in the classroom.
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Unexpected
learning |
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What makes these games attractive to use in a workplace or classroom
is that the games are real-life situations and build practical
skills for tomorrow's leaders.
"You are not playing with fantasy creatures. You are playing
with real human beings," said Burak.
Eric Keylor, a computer programmer on the Peacemaker team says
teachers must accept games as a legitimate way to teach and learn.
 "Games
are it," said Keylor. "It is now the dominant art form
of the 21st century. They are and will be the dominant medium
for the foreseeable future."
"Gaming is the most insidious type of learning that there
can possibly be," said Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief
of Computer Gaming Magazine at a Serious Games workshop two years
ago. "It's unexpected learning, it's learning you get as
a byproduct of the experience."
While educators such as Bernard Cesarone of the University of
Illinois point out that there is little hard evidence that games
have a positive impact, the developers insist on their educational
value.
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Fight world
hunger and manage astronauts |
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According to Moledina, games were first used as training tools
on Wall Street in the 1970s as stock market simulators. Around
the same time, the army began using war games to train soldiers.
Today, the most popular game on the market is America's Army,
an official U.S. Army game that teaches about fighting tactics
and boasts over six million players.
Recently games have expanded from training into education.
Food Force is a game designed by the United Nations World Food
Program to teach children ages 8-13 about world hunger. The game
simulates a country threatened by a hunger crisis. Acting as a
humanitarian aid worker, the player must complete a series of
missions to plan and complete a successful emergency response.
Food Force has been downloaded over 2 million times since its
launch at www.food-force.com.
"It's been kind of a surprise for us. It  just
took off," said Jennifer Parmelee, a spokeswoman for the
U.N.'s food program in the Washington Post.
Another example is SpaceStationSim, a game developed with the
National Aeronautic Space Administration, or NASA, that conveys
the challenges of managing astronauts aboard the International
Space Station.
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But can serious
games make money? |
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MTV recently announced a contest that challenges students to
combine technology and activism to teach about the crisis in Sudan.
The Darfur Digital Activist Contest will award $50,000 to an individual
or group of college students that designs 
interactive media project or game to educate about the genocide
in Darfur.
While nobody expects serious games to take over the game industry,
they are becoming more popular and designers like Keylor and Burak
say that someday they will become a lasting component of the $6.9
billion game market.
And they will need to make a profit to keep creating new games
and attract talented designers. "It's all about money,"
said Burak.
--
By Anna Shoup for NewsHour Extra
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It makes me want to come to school every day, and it has given me something that I’m really good at.
