Serious Games

The concept of serious games is very similar to that of gamification. Not that there is a specific definition of a serious game but the term has come to mean "games used for training, advertising, simulation, or education that are designed to run on personal computers or video game consoles" (p.3) Why could this be important to finally realizing gaming's full potential? The reason is for an initiative that began in 2002 called serious game initiative. As of 2007, the serious games market was about 20 million dollars. You can check out the website by clicking here.

In the journal from where I am receiving my current information, it says that most people are agree on a definition for a serious game which is, " Most agree on a core meaning that serious games are (digital) games used for purposes other than mere entertainment" (p.1). I am thinking about my question that I began with on this blog about games being used for ways besides solely entertainment and have realized for a some time now this is not a thought I had alone. Although other issues for thought do arise.

Many people question the positive effects of games. Granted, I personally must agree that not all games have positive effects, but with the game initiative it supports game designers to  create serious games. Also, some like Professor Zyda believe that entertainment has to come first and then the learning part underlying in the game. And then, there is the book Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform  by David Michael and Sande Chen who give contrasting beliefs.

The initiative has conferences and several studies. What answers will be told and what games will be created for the learning or health experience are for the future to tell.

Susi, T., Johannesson, M., & Backlund, P. (2007). Serious games – an overview . Retrieved from http://www.autzones.com/din6000/textes/semaine12/SusiEtAl(2005).pdf

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Forecasting Innovation

Hello everyone. Last week I talked about Jane McGonigal's (who has become quite an inspiration) book. I also told you there were pretty cool games that were mentioned  in the book and which McGonigal helped in the making of. Here's an overview of some of the games. Please look into them, especially if you're already interested. The information that I am using is slightly from the book and also from the videos on McGonigal's website which I will re post. All of these games are called Forecasting games. They help create more or less realistic futures and documents the experiences. McGonigal explains it as the person is not role playing but is "real playing" because it is game where the player is given a situation, and the player not a fictional character must react to the environment.

SuperStruct 

As usual for these kinds of games, it takes place in the future. Players were asked to envision themselves in this future world realistically and then were given scenarios or superthreats. They would then choose one and write about it. The writing would go from stories to blogs and other people could then join in on an idea. Ideas and solutions would build to extraordinary lengths. Many were encouraged to even go on and create there own superthreats and create a community to solve a problem. 

Evoke

This game is one of my personal favorites. The game's story is in the style of a graphic novel. The novel sends you on a mission as if you were a part of an organization, and it becomes up to you to figure out ways on saving the world with certain issues one mission at a time. The game was put into action in many countries but one of the most used places were several parts of Africa. Many students found it to be engaging because many schools wanted a more collaborative and engaging way to learn and solve real world issues. Evoke was originally online, but for those who don't have access to internet let them not despair. The first pack of missions are being made into a real graphic novel.

World Without Oil (created by Ken Ecklund)

Imagine the world when an oil crisis hits. 1800 players did, and then they wrote about it. Not only through the game but with blogs, podcasts, and even some wrote comic book style stories. The game essentially is "a collaborative simulation of a global oil shortage." People, for 32 days, had to adapt to their way of living (Made up story but thinking realistically). The game changed some people's lives literally by making them think about their habits.

Now this is quite a broad, basic scope of the intense, serious detail that when on during these games and in the making of them. In my humble quest of searching for an answer to whether or not video games will help for other causes in the future, I am beginning to see an answer that is taking form.

Mcgonigal, J. (2010, December 25). Wordpress.com. Retrieved from http://janemcgonigal.com/ 

McGonigal, J. M. (2011). Reality is broken: Why game make us better and how they can change the worlds. Grand Haven, Michigan: Brilliance Audio.

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A Peak at a Broken Reality

Throughout this week, I have been listening to the audio recording of a book called Reality is Broken Why Games Make Us Better And How they Can Change The World written by Jane McGoniagal PhD, who is a world-renowned  alternate reality game designer and creator of several award winning games in more than 30 countries. She has made many interesting points on how playing games can help save the world. (Coincidentally, I just happened to see an interview of McGonigal in the CNN program The Next List as I began to write this blog entry).  McGonigal’s ideas are backed up by quite a bit of scientific evidence as she describes how games can lead us to a better future.
 One of the book’s initial stories talks about the Lydians who may have survived 18 years of famine with the help of games.  Lydians, led by their leader Herodotus, created the dice and would spend an entire day devoted to creating and playing games so as to ignore the pains of hunger.  McGonigal’s point is not that playing games made the Lydians survive, but that the bonding and collaboration skills that came with playing games helped the Lydians succeed with their struggle. This is told as an example of how games could help a civilization survive and prosper, and as the Lydians, we must look to games as the answer of many world problems.

Gaming has become an irremovable part of millions upon millions of people's lives. Some spend small amounts of time and others 40 hours a week. It is a mass exodus from reality because, according to McGonigal, people are beginning to find reality less interesting, and the excitement of playing games isn't in the real world. What is the solution? Eradicating games? Letting this game playing exodus continue? McGonigal envisions a better idea. How about taking a challenge in life and turning it into a game. Many gamers already spend hours collaborating in intense missions and hone in on their adaptive skills when playing games. Make a problem into a game and people will solve it. After all, gamers get addicted to a game because they want to learn about the problem or the objective of the game and become a master at solving it, which brings out the topic of the science behind video games.
 McGonigal is passionate about the emotional side of gaming, and explains scientific behaviors through her own investigations of  the game industry's experiments. She talks about why games deliver such a happy feeling and get gamers in a state of “flow,” a concept created by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (chick-SENT-me-hi).  According to Csikszentmihalyi, “the flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.”
Many game designers are hiring researchers in positive psychology, who study the science of happiness, to discover what makes humans happy so as to put those findings to work in a game. Brain scans also reveal strong emotion while playing a game.
 McGonigal shares an anecdote in the book. It reveals that games have always brought the state of flow in people even without high tech graphics and huge story lines. It also reveals that too much flow can end up to what is referred as flow burnout. Players who have mastered a game, for the most part, stop playing the game. The challenge is over! Game developers don't want players to burn out because they want life-long players. A lot of playing may also lead to gamers' regret (something that I personally along with many other players have experienced). It is the thought that you could have been doing something else instead of playing so many hours of your favorite games.  However, McGonigal continues to inspire gamers to continue playing games because they can indeed help
 Nobody enjoys failing in whatever we are trying to accomplish. I fail, you fail, professors fail, and that failing hurts. Then, why is it that people who play games and fail an average of 80 percent during playing time still enjoy playing? Surprise, surprise, gamers actually enjoy failing.  According to a study developed at M.I.N.D. Lab in Helsinki, Finland, positive emotional stimulation peaks when the player has failed. The book uses a game called Super Monkey Ball 2 as an example. When the player loses, the monkey goes flying into space. There are rules and reasons for these happenings. For example, if failing is fun, like seeing a monkey fly into space, then gamers may be fine with failing.  Another reason may be the fairness of the game.  A term coined as “justifiable optimism” is being happy playing a game because you know that the game is beatable. This includes that no matter how many times you die in the game, it is fun so long as the death is fair.   Failing in a game is also more fun when in a group of friends. McGonigal thinks that this failing actually creates a stronger skin metaphorically, of course, and make gamers more adept to handling failure by replacing it with justifiable optimism.
 Optimism is powerful and it fuels the reasons for games. McGonigal talks about Randolph Nesse’s theories of depression. Nesse believed that because so many people are depressed, the size of depression in the gene pool means that depression must be an evolutionary way to survive. He hypothesized that depression set in to make someone avoid a situation where the outcome wouldn’t end well. In today's society she, McGonigal, discusses how many are raised with the ideology that anyone can become "big" if they dream "big", many believe we can do anything we want. This thinking is created instead of focusing on the skills we do have and making them better.  Games help fill the void of being someone we dreamed to be.  Take the game Rock Band 2 for example, not many people become rock stars, but the game allows the player to become a rock star. This optimism filled with fantasy is an example of how games could help players feel better with themselves. Games have actually shown to improve mildly depressed patients better than other methods.
 The book goes on to talk about really cool topics like developers' secrets and how games can improve reality. McGonigal has 14 fixes to help reality that she learned from games (from games to real life) but I won’t go into more detail. They are focused on in the book. After the fourteen fixes be sure to watch the  TED talk video (her TED video was awarded 16th place out of 835 of most engaging talks as of 2010) from her website or go directly to her website. Links will be posted at the bottom.
“[#1 tackling unnecessary obstacles; #2 Activate extreme positive emotions; #3 do more satisfying work;
#4 Find or obtain better hope for success; #5 Strengthen social conductivity (like multiplayer games) by making things more meaningful by putting them in a bigger context; #6 Immerse yourself in epic scale; #7 Participate whole heartedly whenever we can (levels motivate us); #8 Seek meaningful rewards with better efforts; #9 Have more fun with strangers (Big crowd games/advice for a good life); # 10 Invent and adopt new happiness acts; # 11 Contribute to a sustainable economy ( social participation that saves lives and gives heroic feelings just like a game does); #12 Seek out more epic wins (with so much game time, people can plan and cooperate more) #13 Spend 10,000 hours collaborating (refers to forecast games  which will be discussed next week) #14 Have one long epic game where people can compound knowledge and ideas to solve problems  in one place or game encompassing the creation of work that really matters and where everyone has a role in the game.
 
McGonigal, J. M. (2011). Reality is broken: Why game make us better and how they can change the worlds. Grand Haven, Michigan: Brilliance Audio.  

McGonigal's website is http://janemcgonigal.com/ , and to go straight to the video, click video.Before this blog entry comes to an end, I want to inform you that several specific games discussed in the book that exemplify games working for a greater purpose. Those games will be blogged about next week so stay tune!
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War in a Sandbox

One of my first postings had to with some of the ways people have already begun to play with the idea that games can be used to solve real problems. In my personal views, I prefer violence in video games rather than outside of them, but war is real and probably will be for a long time. In war, like almost anything, there are problems for example with war there are soldiers who must be trained requiring ammunition, trainers, and most importantly, actual land to practice on. Space to train soldiers has become a big issue. Army Col. Anthony D. Krogh spoke to the American Forces Press Service saying, "We have a lot of soldiers coming home to stations here in the United Staes, and...we don't have enough terrain in many of those places to train those soldiers out on live ranges." Luckily, for them, there's a game for that.

The video game that is most widely used for its success especially when calculating the cost versus usage aspect is called Virtual Battlespace 2 created by the Bohemia Interactive Studio. One of the most realistic and detailed specific virtual world designed for war. A large number of people can play at once whether they play on land, sea, or air. Lifelike happenings take place. Intricate and complex buildings and places may be destroyed, and the weapons work as true to themselves as far as a video game can currently do that. Krogh talked about having one battalion in real space while the others go into the game which is now being referred to as "constructive simulation". In a game most people are are equal in combat, unless someone is of a higher level,  which may throw some skeptics off thinking that you may not run as fast in real life as you do in the game or other thoughts of the sort but the Army is coming up with a new system that tracks real world data of an individual that syncs into the virtual environment or world. If someone is only a marksman then in the virtual world tried to become a sharp shooting expert the percentage of shots hitting and killing someone would drop because that person has no experience in that area.The same goes for physical test. If the player doesn't have do that well in the PT test then the avatar will not run as fast as other players who have higher PT. According to Krogh, this has assisted players realize that they have to increase their PT because they are getting left behind. He said, "I would say within the next two years we’ll be able to put many of these capabilities in place."

But a realistic experience is not the only use this game has to offer. The best practice is where a person can see how, where, and why the mistakes were made, which is exactly what a module called after-action review (AAR) does. It "records every player action, bullet path, explosion and vehicle movement for a detailed examination of the training mission" said Krogh. It shows what needs work and in what areas does the certain individual need to focus on.

Krogh optimistically stated," Despite the progress the Army is just getting started."
Do you think that future simulation can get to the point where people once would have thought it to be science fiction? Where are these games going to take us? A big question would be, will people believe war to be a game? (A more humorous thought would be if countries had war through a video game)

Pellerin, P. C. Defense Department, (2011). Army warfighters go digital to hone skills . Retrieved from American Forces Information Service News Articles website: http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SFL2086-0-4692&artno=0000314164&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=Virtual Battle Space 2&title=Army Warfighters Go Digital to Hone Skills&res=N&ren=Y&gov=Y&lnk=Y&ic=N
Fun Fact: In video game lingo, a sandbox style game generally refers to a large (sometimes massive) open world, free to roam game.
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