I’ve been following Seth Godin’s blog for a long time now, and I’ve got a copy of his latest book which I’m trying to set aside the time to read.  But yesterday he posted something that tied in to what I’d been discussing here for a while, in a post entitled Accepting Limits.

It’s absurd to look at a three year old toddler and say, “this kid can’t read or do math or even string together a coherent paragraph. He’s a dolt and he’s never going to amount to anything.” No, we don’t say that because we know we can teach and motivate and cajole the typical kid to be able to do all of these things.

Why is it okay, then, to look at a teenager and say, “this kid will never be a leader, never run a significant organization, never save a life, never inspire or create…”

Just because it’s difficult to grade doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taught.

This is a video that my mother, who works in children’s television, sent me a little while ago.  She found it exceedingly powerful, as did I.

I was a bright kid, but I was never exactly a straight-A student.  In kindergarden I took some standardized tests, and scored in the “highly gifted” bracket.  When my parents received my test results they asked for advice on what to do—whether I should transfer to a new school, etc.  The test administrators gave my parents what they later told me was the best advice they ever received about education, and that was this:  ”No one has any idea what to do with highly gifted students.  The educational system as it is now is designed to accomodate people who are average.  People may tell you that they know what is best for your child, but no one knows for sure.  Ultimately, you have to make the choices that you think are best for your child.”

I barely squeaked by in my high school classes with Cs and the occasional D—mostly because I wasn’t doing the homework.  I had to make up a class in summer school every year, from 8th grade through 12th.  In my junior year I went to see the school psychologist, who recommended that I be tested for ADD.  I was whisked away to take a series of tests with a man named Dr. Colegrove, who I remember fondly to this day.  When he was finished, he wrote up a report to send back to my parent’s saying basically, “Casey doesn’t have ADD—he’s just really bored.”

When I graduated high school I attended community college for a year and a half, took a very intense six month course to become a recording engineer, and then went to work.  I bounced around the workplace trying to find the job that was right for me, and finally was lucky enough to be hired at my current company when I had basically no relevant experience (except for being a WoW player, which we have learned is more experience than it seems).  Now I’m taking classes online for a BA in Marketing, and eagerly awaiting the day when all these general eds are finished so I can learn something interesting.

In the whole of my life I have never found anything in the American educational system that did not come from the determined, singular effort of either myself—to make my own learning—or the handful of brilliant teachers who were willing to break free of the “educational system” and engage me.

And why would I? I was just like every other kid.  I would much rather be playing games.

Games are proving themselves to be the best way to teach, motivate and cajole the average teenager into doing something.  Let’s make games that teach them to be leaders, to run organizations, to inspire, to create, and to save lives.

The Escapist just published an article entitled Technology Will Turn your Life Into A Game.  It talks in some detail about how game design principles are being applied to corporate marketing.  Examples are given, like the new Starbucks Gold Card, which lets you earn “experience points” by buying coffee, which earn you “level-ups” that grant you “new abilities” (like discounts, free drinks, free wi-fi, etc.).  The privileges also expire if you don’t buy enough coffee.

Sound familiar?  These are the same principles of addiction that were discussed in the Cracked article I linked yesterday.

Here’s what I’m taking away from this: Games have the power to make people do things.  There are already hundreds of thousands of people out there who know about these principles, and are using them to make money.  There’s only one industry that is founded on the idea of using these principles of addiction to create enjoyment, rather than just money—and that’s the game industry.

We, as conscientious members of the game industry, have a responsibility to look into ways to use these game design principles for GOOD, rather than for evil.  To create games that educate the players, inform them, show them truths about the world and each other.

We need to fight back with educational games—and I’m not talking about “educational games” the way we’re used to thinking of them. I’m talking about turning our classrooms into a game the same way Starbucks has turned buying coffee into a game.  I’m talking about abandoning letter grades, and teaching our kids with experience points and level-ups.

I’m talking about corporate games—internal systems in companies that encourage people to do their best work using game design principles.

I’m talking about games that encourage charitable behavior and volunteer work.

I’m talking about using game design principles to encourage young people to vote, to research local laws, and otherwise get involved with their community.

This is why I think gaming can change the world.  And it’s the people who are in the game industry, who make games and who play them, who are going to change the world—because we’re the ones for whom gaming is more than just a way to make money.

If only it were so simple...

In my last post, I talked about the “magic number”—10,000 hours, the amount of dedicated practice time that it requires to become a master at a certain skill.  I reference the fact that as it stands currently, the average gamer will have 10,000 hours of gaming experience under his belt by age 21.  We are all, in fact, experts at gaming.  But what does being an expert gamer actually teach me?

Learning With Your Hands

In the comments on the last post, my father reminded me of a special we both saw which talked about laparoscopic surgery.  Laparoscopic surgery is a form of surgical procedure in which rather than slicing open the patient completely, the surgeon makes several small, nickel-sized incisions and inserts a tiny camera underneath the patients skin.  He then uses these complicated tools as his “hands” to perform surgery—including cutting, cauterizing, and stitching.  It’s much less invasive than traditional surgery, and the recovery time is much quicker.  It was of special interest to the two of us at the time, since my father had just undergone a laparoscopic procedure in his shoulder.

I imagine most of you have guessed the punchline.  The special indicated that surgeons who play video games have a higher success rate at performing laparoscopic surgery than surgeons who didn’t play regularly.  And we’re not just talking about a small increase here—we’re talking about performing surgery 27% faster, and with 37% fewer errors. That’s a tremendous difference when we’re talking about errors in surgery.  With numbers like that, wouldn’t you want to know you were being operated on by a gamer?

If you think about it, the connection between the experience of gaming and the experience of performing laparoscopic surgery is not a hard one to draw.  Laparoscopy involves using complicated tools to make fine, careful movements, and your only guide as to how you’re doing is—you guessed it—an image on a video screen.  I imagine it surprises no one that these are skills that you can develop by playing a lot of video games.  Only the staunchest anti-video game activists would ever argue that you can’t learn hand-eye coordination from a video game.  But can games teach us more than that?

Learning With Your Heart

Some time ago I read an article on Wired which you may have read also—it made the rounds on a lot of WoW related blogs.  The article was titled You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!

This article is packed FULL of choice quotes, but let me reproduce the most important one here:

In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.

I ran a World of Warcraft guild myself, for a while—a small one, back in The Burning Crusade.  We never got further than Karazhan, and eventually we dissolved into a larger raiding guild; my WoW playing these days is much more low-pressure.  But that brief time, along with my experience as an officer in previous guilds, prepared me better for the workplace than any previous job I had ever had.

Or to put it in more absolute terms: Being a WoW guildmaster is better “management experience” than any non-management job.

Everyone is familiar with the old catch-22 of the working world: you can’t get hired until you have experience, and  you can’t get experience until you get hired.  I daresay that if the people who do the hiring can learn to recognize it, this could present a very real solution to this age-old problem.

So we’ve talked about how gaming can make you a better artisan (physical), and how gaming can make you a better manager (social).  What does this leave?  Could gaming teach you to better perform complicated mental tasks as well?

Learning With Your Head

At GDC I was afforded the opportunity to have dinner with the author of Lost Garden, one of my favorite gaming blogs ever.  One of the things he mentioned at dinner was his recent creation of a game called Ribbon Hero.  Danc has written a post explaining it here, but as before I’d like to reproduce a relevant quote:

Ribbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. I made the following bet:

• If an activity can be learned…
• If the player’s performance can be measured…
• If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
• Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.

Not only can you make a game out of the activity, but you can turn tasks traditionally seen as a rote or frustrating into compelling experiences that users find delightful.

Danc also posted the slides from the original speech, which you can download in PDF format.  Danc puts together great slides, so I recommend these highly.

The fact is, genuinely powerful computer applications are incredibly complicated.  At one point I went to school to learn how to use Pro Tools, and the teachers there had all been working as professionals in the recording industry for years—and yet I still managed to show my teacher a useful Pro Tools shortcut he didn’t know about.  The level of complexity in an app like Photoshop is unbelievable, and let’s be honest—the manuals aren’t doing anyone any favors.  Pro Tools for Dummies is 720 pages long.

But if you can make it into a game, I can learn it.  Not only can I learn it, but I can learn it quickly and permanently—in a way that I retain over the long term—and I will have fun doing it.  And as Danc explains in the slides linked above, it’s not even that difficult.  It all hinges on the idea of exploratory learning.

The modern conception of user interface design centers around the concept that users are dumb.  The oft-repeated mantra is “Don’t make me think!” UIs are built around the idea that people are stupid.  As Danc writes, “Sit in on any usability test and your subjects will flail about, click on the wrong things and ignore most obvious visual cues. We assume that users are idiots because we see them behave like idiots whenever we test them.”

But users AREN’T idiots.  The level of skill involved in effectively organizing and defeating a high level raid in World of Warcraft are on par with the skills required to do high level photoshop work, or complicated audio editing in Pro Tools.  And yet I know 10 or 15 people who can effectively execute a high level raid in WoW, and only 2 or 3 who can do pro audio editing, and 2 or 3 who know their way around Photoshop—because unlike WoW, I can’t learn Pro Tools or Photoshop as a game.

But…what if I could?

The Power of Games

Cracked posted an article a few days ago, entitled 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying To Get You Addicted.  Danc puts a more positive spin on the same concept when he says, “It turns out that games are carefully tuned machines that hack into human being’s most fundamental learning processes. Games are exercises in applied psychology at a level far more nuanced than your typical application.”  David Wong from Cracked writes about how these powers can be used for evil.  But Jane McGonigal from TED talks to us about how they can be used for good.

So the big question: We can use the principles of game design to do more than entertain.  How are we going to use them to educate, to train, to build social and emotional skills, and to make the world a better place?

Some of you may know that in addition to writing this blog, I am also the editor of the Wowhead Blog.  One of our volunteer staffers on Wowhead is a guy named Evgeni Kirilov (known on the site as ArgentSun) who I work with a lot.  He wrote a post two days ago that I would have written if I had gotten the chance to get it down on paper first.  The post is here: Gaming Can Make a Better World

The core theme of the post is a talk from TED by a speaker named Jane McGonigal.  You can watch the video embedded in that blog post, or you can watch the video directly on the TED website here, but in either case I encourage you to watch—I found it to be incredibly meaningful.

Jane’s speech contains a number of points which I found extremely compelling.  She mentions a statistic unearthed by a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon: that the average 21 year old, in a country with a “strong gamer culture” has 10,000 hours of gaming experience under his belt.

This isn’t just an arbitrary number, she draws two meaningful parallels:

• 10,000 hours is roughly the amount of time a student will spend in school from 5th grade to high school graduation, if the student has perfect attendance.
• 10,000 hours is the “magic number” that Malcolm Gladwell arrives at in his book Outliers, as the amount of time it takes for someone to achieve mastery in a certain skill.

I’d like to go into a little more detail about this than Ms. McGonigal did.  I read Outliers some time ago and enjoyed it a great deal, and was delighted to be able to draw a parallel between it and gaming.  In chapter 2, The 10,000 Hour Rule, Gladwell talks in great detail about the formulas for success, and one of the conclusions he comes to is summed up in this quote from neurologist David Levitin:

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.  In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up agin and again.  Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do.  But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.  It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Mr. Gladwell’s book is a delightful read, and I encourage you all to look into that as well—for all of its merits, not just its relevancy to gaming.  Gladwell makes one more point later in the chapter that I wish to reproduce:

“The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time.  It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult.  You have to have parents who encourage and support you.  You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough.  In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program—like a hockey all-star squad—or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.”

Now, looking at that paragraph, look back up at that image and read that statistic again.

What this means is that people all over the country, and the world, are putting in that tremendous, difficult, onerous, magical number of hours learning a specific skill—gaming—without even meaning to. We didn’t even realize it, but we are part of an entire generation of World-Class Expert Gamers.

Up next: What do we do with all this expertise?

Specifically, someone linked me to the video below:

My favorite quote: “You bring a game into a house…nothing to stop an 8 year old from becoming a terrorist and shooting people.”  And that’s from the anchor.

Now any gamer would be outraged by this, of course—but heaping scorn and ridicule on Fox News for their ultra-conservative right-wing media coverage is kind of like making fun of a midget for being short.  What really outraged me was Jon Christensen.  You let us down, Jon.

You must have known what you were getting into when you were asked to appear on the program—It’s Fox News.  Poor Jon looked like they had called him up to ask for commentary 10 minutes before the show aired.  He had the chance to stand up in front of the nation and tell everyone how violent video games aren’t destroying our youth, and what was his argument?  That no one should be offended, because you weren’t pretending to be a terrorist—you were pretending to be a CIA agent who was pretending to be a terrorist?

Here’s what Jon should have said.

There has been no increase in violent crime to correspond with the increase in video game violence.

There’s no doubt that violence in video games is on the rise—any gamer knows this.  What is frequently ignored is the fact that in the corresponding years, violent crime in the US has seen a massive decrease.  Here’s the evidence, courtesy of Stubborn Facts:

Violent Crimes in the US from 1985 to 2005

The source on the numbers used to create this graph is credited to a study performed by the FBI.  Now this is a pretty massive decrease in violent crime, and I’m proud of my country—but it’s pretty unmistakeable to watch that as video games have gotten more violent and more realistic, violent crime in the country has decreased.

For context, here’s Wikipedia’s list of video games released in 1991, the highest point on this graph.  This is the year that brought us such incredibly violent games as Bomberman 2, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Game Boy Adventure, and Duke Nukem—not the one with the strippers, the original, in which Duke battles the nefarious Dr. Proton, and then retires to his home to watch Oprah.  (Look it up, I’m not kidding.)

Here’s some gameplay footage from Fatal Fury: King of Fighters, one of the more violent games I could find on that list:

And a screenshot from the 1991 Amiga game Extreme Violence, to prove the point:

That IS pretty extreme.

Here, meanwhile, is the list of video games released in 2005.  This list includes such gems as Call of Duty 2, Crime Life: Gang Wars, and Viet Cong 2.  Just to compare, here’s the video trailer for Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, which also came out that year:

I think it’s pretty easy to follow the line I’m drawing here.  From 1991 to 2005, the amount of violence in games, as well as the visceral realism of that violence, has increased dramatically—and violent crime in the US has decreased just as dramatically.  Case closed.  As my brother pointed out in his own eloquent blog, Playing Columbine, “Small scale cause-and-effect studies don’t do much for your cause when correlational evidence is stacked so high against you.”

Edit: Due to a misunderstanding, credit was not given—the first person to link this video to me was Brian Rubinow, who maintains The Select Button.  Credit where credit is due: Sorry Brian!