Richard Bartle is one of the Elders of the Univesrse when it comes to Game Design.
He had a good rant in the Guardian the other day. I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about it before. But there you go . . .
I’m talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games: you’ve already lost. Enjoy your carping while you can, because tomorrow you’re gone.
In a recent article, Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield (right) has voiced some pretty significant concerns about video games. With their explosive growth into mainstream culture, video games are taking up more and more of our collective brain cycles. What effect will this have on our species? Quite a profound one, she suggests. I agree - but I think her conclusions beyond that are bunk.
The Baroness Professor is pretty heavy duty. She’s the sort of person you listen to when she has something to say. Greenfield claims that the brains of today’s youth are headed for a drastic alteration:
Given the time young people spend gazing into screens, small and large – reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily – she believes the minds of the younger generation are developing differently from those of previous generations. “The brain,” she says, “has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I spend the majority of my awake time staring into a screen. Given that you’re reading this, I’ll wager the same is true for you, too. There’s no way that this lifestyle is not affecting our minds.
So we agree that gaming and electronic culture in general is going to affect us all significantly. But what will those effects be? The Baroness Professor enumerates:
[Greenfield] sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking.
OK, one at a time here:
1. The substitution of virtual experience for real encounters. The thing a lot of people seem to miss when they’re talking about games, and the internet in general, is that Information Technology is communication technology. It’s all about connecting people. Games are no exception. Games are interactive, unlike the other media that used to take up most of our time, books and video (cinema or TV). What’s more, most games throughout history have been multiplayer games, and video games are no different. Think about it - solitaire is a rare exception. People have always gotten together to play together. Why are World of Warcraft, Second Life and Habbo Hotel so popular? Because you connect with other people and do things together. The Wii’s phenomenal success is due to this. Look at their advertising:
What do you see here? People. Playing together. The technology is almost not in the picture.
The Wii is popular because it enables connections between people. Other games are similar connectors. I have frequently played Medieval Total War online with my brother, who lives in a different city - time spent together that we otherwise would never have. In a world where many people lead isolated, alienated lives, a technology that allows them to play together - even via avatars, at a distance - is extremely valuable. In fact, it’s worth cash money. That’s why Nintendo is winning the console wars.
2. The impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry. Greenfield clearly needs to play more video games. If she did, she’d know that games do not spoon-feed people anything. Games are all about learning by doing. What we call “fun” in games is actually the process of acquiring an intuitive understanding of how a given (game) system functions. (More on this here.) You try, you fail, you try something different, you fail, you try again - success! A little dopamine hit reinforces the behaviour you’ve just practiced, and you’re on to the next challenge. There’s nothing spoon-fed about the way people learn things in video games.
Let’s compare games (and the internet, for that matter) with book learning. When reading a book, you take in facts and ideas in exactly the order the author sets them out. What’s more, everyone else reading the same book gets the same message, in the same order. Interactive media like the net and games allow everyone to dig for their own intellectual gold, in their own way. Sounds like free-ranging inquiry to me.
3. A decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity. I submit exhibit ‘A’: this blog post. It took a bit of time and effort to put it together. I’d argue it took a little linguistic imagination and creativity, too. Millions of posts like this one are saturating the noosphere with a profusion of ideas unlike anything the world has ever seen.
I also present exhibit ‘B’:
This amusing clip is the fruit of someone’s creativity. It’s not great film or great art, but it’s someone’s interesting idea that we have now shared. There’s plenty more where it came from: ten hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In the past, the opportunity for this kind of public expression was limited to those few with money and connections. Now, anyone can express themselves on a world stage - and millions are taking the opportunity to do so, every day - every minute. How, then, has imagination and creativity declined?
4. Contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Looks like there’s plenty of grammar and syntax around, thank you very much. There’s just a lot more writing out there. In the past, only educated types with access to copy editors and story editors would ever publish anything. Now, anyone with a keyboard writes to the whole world. Of course, people on average pay less attention to grammar - they’re too busy getting their message out. I’m not going to send a text message in iambic pentameter to tell my mate that I’m waiting in the car!
Little by little, electronic communication is changing the rules of all our languages. Just like writing must have changed the rules, back when it was introduced. Trouble is, we have no evidence of pre-writing grammar because . . . it wasn’t written down. Languages evolve. It’s a fact. But complex thinking isn’t going anywhere - it’s too much of a competitive evolutionary advantage, especially in our complex world.
What I find really amazing in Greenfield’s opinions is her idea of how young people are meant to attain unique and enriched identities:
Through focused conversation, nursery rhyme repetition, recitation and rote learning, of reading and writing interspersed with bouts of physical activity in the real world, where there are first-hand and unique adventures to provide a personal narrative, personalised neuronal connections. This is education as we have known it.
A focused conversation is exactly what this blog is. Reading and writing have exploded with the advent of the internet (see above). The physical activity is everyone’s responsibility - but repetition of nursery rhymes? Recitation and rote learning? I remember when I was eight years old, standing up in class, and reciting the multiplication table in unison with twenty-nine other high-pitched voices, all running into each other in a rhythmic singsong:
“Five times five, twenty five. Six times five, thirty. Seven times five, thirty-five. Eight times five . . .”
At the time, of course, it was normal. But looking back, this sort of behaviour is a most bizarre and artificial excercise in groupthink. It certainly bears scant ressemblance to anything we do in our day to day adult lives.
This is, indeed, education as we have known it. And it’s got plenty to recommend it. But let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that this sort of thing encourages children to “attain unique and enriched identities”!
On the other hand, first-hand and unique adventures providing a personal narrative could do this. The sort of adventures that are simply unavailable to kids from isolated, disenfranchised communities. But play out those adventures in rich, explorable virtual worlds, full of mysteries to discover and real people to interact with . . . and you can open kids up to worlds of possibilities. Plenty of personalized neuronal connections.
Wii fit went on sale this weekend in the UK. It’s not just for your body, either.
I love this - I’ve blogged it before but now there’s nifty embedded video . . .
National Public radio in the US has been running some interesting pieces on video games recently. Lately they’ve taken a stab at a question that becomes more and more important as gaming revenues continue to swell:
Are video games art?
Other media have a long history of relevant, moving social commentary. Movies and books lately have all been tackling important issues - Iraq, international politics, teen pregnancy, etc. But video games mostly stay away from all that ‘commentary’ stuff. There’s a fringe of activist games, sure, but no equivalent to Syriana or Juno. Why not? Are games simply incapable of this sort of sophisticated, nuanced commentary on reality?
Definitely not, as I hope the examples I’ve written about here prove. With enough budget, you could make a socially relevant, thought-provoking blockbuster game. Some day, someone will.
In the meantime, I agree with the conclusion Heather Chaplin, NPR’s correspondent, draws: “Until gaming gets serious, its cultural prominence is just wasted opportunity.”
The piece itself is well worth a listen (4 mins).
When I was growing up . . . OK, actually when I was in J-school, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Going to far-flung places, seeing the world, dodging bullets, meeting important people - it sounded like a really cool job.
Shame they’re an endangered (doomed?) species.
As part of a series of articles over at the Britannica Blog on the impending demise of the newspaper,
I do not believe, however, that the foreign correspondence profession will disappear. If anything, correspondents are needed more than ever because the world has gotten so complex and so small. Only someone on the spot can provide the context and background that curious readers need in order to fully understand what is happening in far-flung places.
How correspondents package their product will vary. It may be words. Or pictures. Or video.
One thing is for sure: It won’t be by telex.
really good foreign coverage requires more than parachuting in, getting a few quotes or a little video coverage, and filing. It requires correspondents to spend time in one place or country, get to know the people and the environment etc.
Both true. I agree that we all need good news investigation and reporting from all over the world. And I’d say that Murphy is right on the money when she says that correspondents can’t just parachute in, shoot, and split to the next war/crisis/coup/etc.
But let’s connect the dots here. Don’t these two thoughts, taken together, mean that foreign correspondents, as a profession, are in fact threatened, if not doomed?
Here’s a thought experiment: You’re the foreign editor a major US news organization. The big story of the day: a threat of civil war in southeast Asia. Vast oil deposits have been discovered just offshore. But the province in whose territory the fields actually lie has announced that it will secede - and take all the oil with it. In response, the national government has moved in the army as a deterrent. Tensions are high. You have two options:
a) There is an American journalist in the area. He is originally from Iowa, but he’s been travelling and reporting in Asia and Africa for years, and built a reputation with his excellent news blog. He regularly freelances for major news organizations like CNN and the BBC on stories of international importance. He is in the region now, and will provide high-quality pictures, text and video.
b) There is a local journalist in the area. She was actually born in the disputed province, and for some years now she’s been living and working in the capital. There, she’s been covering local and national government for the Thai news, on a freelance basis. She also runs a popular blog on southeast Asian politics. Her written English is flawless and she will provide pictures, text and video.
Who will know the area better?
Who will have a better network of local contacts?
Who will understand the nuances of the story better?
Who would you send?
It’s not always going to be cut and dried. But remember that in most circumstances our US journalist ‘a’, above, is going to have to hire a local fixer/translator/driver, anyhow.
But what if the fixer is capable of producing all the material him/herself? Why bother with the import?
UPDATE - The Frontline Blog has a good round-up and discussion on this topic.
Today, the Olympic torch is making its way through London, where I live. Of course, it’s being covered by all the media. There’s some tension: a lot of people in this city view the torch passing as the perfect opportunity to send a message to the powers in Beijing.
The BBC covered the torch relay live. In Ladbroke grove, the sports news story became a political news story:
What’s interesting about this clip, for me, isn’t so much the fact that this happened. It’s that the video is on YouTube. The BBC, you see, doesn’t put things on YouTube. Private individuals, on the other hand, do. Which means that some member of the public lifted the above video off the BBC’s news site, and posted it to YouTube.
There were also more ’spot news’ videos of the event posted to YouTube - like this:
This is arguably a better camera angle than the BBC news crew got - instead of a distant zoom shot, we’ve got a good shot of the protester seizing the flame, and a good look at the chanting supporters with Tibetan flags.
Granted, the camera work isn’t so smooth - it’s shaky, and there are gaps in coverage. But even in this shot you can see at least three people that were even closer to the action. Not so professional as the BBC’s guy, maybe. But niesfisch was right there, close enough to see everything, almost close enough to touch the event. And his video is newsworthy. It’s crowdsourced journalism. With YouTube going live later this year, and services like Qik already live, we’re only going to see more of this.
Everyone in the audience has a camera. And everyone in the audience can broadcast their feed live to the world. If the BBC (or anyone) can figure out an efficient way for people like niesfisch to get newsworthy video onto their own organization’s portal, instead of YouTube, in a timely and yet edited fashion, they’ll have a good thing going . . .
Yesterday I led a seminar with Paul Dwyer’s Media class at the Univeristy of Westminster. The subject was games as a maturing medium, capable of great sophistication, depth and variety of expression. I think journalists and news organisations should be interested in video games as vectors for news and current affairs. If you’d like to find out why, take a look at the slides.
The quick version is this:
Demographics. Who actually plays games? Well, in short - everyone. 100% of 6-10 year-olds play video games multiple times a week. 97% of 11-16 year-olds do. And so on. Even in the 55-and-over age bracket, nearly 1/5th are gamers. Take the whole population together, and you’ll find that nearly half of everybody in the UK plays games more than once a week. We’re in the middle of a demographic shift from a society of non-gamers to a society of gamers. Any media organization that ignores this does so at its peril.
Fun. The real reason journalism needs to get into games is because they’re fun. This may seem obvious. But when you see what ‘fun’ really is, you’ll see why this is so important.
Let’s look at a simple example. Tic-tac-toe (or noughts and crosses, if you’re in the UK) is a pretty lame game. You play it as a kid and then you soon get bored of it. Why?
Because it is limited. There are only 23,580 possible games of tic-tac-toe. This may seem like a large number, but compare to chess (something over 10^50 possible games, at a lower bound) and you’ll see that it’s pitifully small. The fact is that with tic-tac-toe, you soon understand all the possible patterns and mentally map all the possible outcomes. This happens subconsciously, but that’s just how cool our brains are - they figure things out without you even realising it. Once you’ve understood this game fully, it becomes boring.
All games are like this. Most of them are much more complicated. Tetris is about the geometry of tetrads. Halo (and all FPS games) is about precise aim and timing. Grand Theft Auto is about exploration. In GTA, once you’ve explored the whole map, it’s done and the game is boring. Once you’ve fully understood any game - it becomes boring.
So fun is the process of acquiring understanding.
It’s trying again and again and again, because you want that “Aha! I got it!” moment so badly. Every time you hit that moment, you get a little shot of dopamine in your brain. That feels good; dopamine is the satisfaction chemical.
The corollary to this is that there is no game that is not educational. So that’s the second reason news organisations should be interested in games. ‘Cause they’re one of the most powerful educational devices known to our species.
You know what else gives you a little hit of dopamine when you do it?
Crack cocaine.
In neurochemistry terms, games are like crack. Only instead of destroying your family and leaving you peniless and desperate on the street, games leave you with more skills and understanding than when you started.
What you gain those skills and that understanding about depends entirely on the game design. A game like Halo 3 or just teaches you to aim and fight. (Just? well, maybe not ‘just’ - otherwise the US Army wouldn’t be interested in this sort of game.) But there are many games that teach sophisticated skills and subtle understanding. Some are interesting in the journalism context - like JFK Reloaded, September 12, Global Conflict: Palestine, and Sim City. There are links to them all on the right.
As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments. Happy playing!
Can games be journalism? Take a look at Exhibit A: JFK Reloaded, from now-defunct Scottish game studio Traffic Management Games.
It’s a first-person shooter designed to accurately model what happened at about half-past noon on November 22, 1963. You are in the position of Lee Harvey Oswald - on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, with a scoped rifle. The presidential motorcade turns the corner. Zoom in. Crosshairs on a face. Now what?
The game is designed to be an accurate reconstruction of what happened that day. The ballistics model is supposed to be top-notch, and the behaviour of the people in the sim, on the whole, is quite good. If you’re used to sniping in a first-person shooter game, it’s not so hard to score a head-shot on JFK in the slow-moving motorcade. But it is very difficult to replicate what happened in reality that day: three shots, killing the President and wounding the governor, leaving everyone else unharmed.
If you are very good (and rather lucky), you can replicate the exact pattern of shots and injuries that were reported in the Warren Commission’s report after the assassination - no gunman on the grassy knoll, no conspiracy.
Effectively, you could see JFK Reloaded as a piece of journalism proving that Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone. When it was released, amid the vitriolic controversy, its makers claimed that this is what it was all about.
Is JFK Reloaded journalism?
It’s graphic in its violence and questionable in its morality - but how is it different from this?
I’m curious to see what you think. But play it first: you can download it for free.
Interesting point from Raph Koster:
Most games throughout history have been multiplayer, if you think about it. Everything from chess to Monopoly. It’s only since the invention of video games that we have seen so many single-player games being invented – it used to be the exception, like Solitaire. So yes, I do agree that multiplayer games are better in a lot of ways, and truer to the spirit of what games are: social learning activities.
Social learning activities. Emphasis added. Gaming is learning anyways - fun is the process of mastering a hitherto unfamiliar task or skill, to solve a challenge. You get a rush when you achieve something. The anticipation of that rush is what keeps you going, keeps you playing, just one turn more, just one turn more . . .
So gaming is the exercise and refinement of individual applied intelligence. Gaming together is the excercise of applied collective intelligence. Gaming together trains teamwork, communication, networking, diplomacy, social nous. These are things that make us better citizens. Even, maybe, better people.
I’m not making this up - I’ve got scholarly references.
Games are going to change the world just as fundamentally as television and radio did. And playing together is one of the reasons they will . . .
Deisgning games to teach maths? How about health and safety? Not exactly aiming for the top of the charts, are you?
Well, math games have already busted through the charts on Nintendo’s DS, and now some folks in Michigan are bringing a similar sensibility to the PSP.
But Health and Safety? Yeah. It’s happening. And it sounds like an interesting project.
Researchers at Nottingham Trent Uni are starting a £294,000 project to develop games that will teach disadvantaged youth new skills.
GOAL.NET will use a series of interactive computer games to develop basic vocational skills such as travel training, communication support’ CV writing, job search, work experience, health and safety training, employment rights and benefits advice.
Their focus is particularly on engaging people with learning difficulties or disabilities, which makes the project very interesting in my opinion.
But don’t take my word for it, check out their official release.
