May 26, 2012 · www.gothamgazette.com

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Technologists Explore How Games Can Be Used As Learning Tools
NY1, June 9, 2004

It's probably one of the most frequent sticking points between parents and their children: how much time should be spent playing video games. As NY1 Tech Beat reporter Adam Balkin explains, we're getting closer to that point in time when parents may actually start encouraging their kids to play.

Imagine this: video games where the goal is to save people, not shoot them. And after winning, players may actually have learned something.

A recent workshop spearheaded by Global Kids called "Serious Issues, Serious Games" explored whether the power of gaming can be harnessed to help the powers of good.

"Right now there are 145 million people in the U.S. that are playing games," said Dave Rejeski of Serious Games Initiative. "What we're trying to do is figure out how to apply that to serious political and social issues in the country and also globally. Everything from balancing the budget in New York City to finding missing children to learning more about the history of America and sort of what happened after the settlement of America."

"I'm kinda here as a representative of 'The Man,' you know," said Brian Loube of AOL Games. "Big corporation may or may not be interested in promoting social issues, but I am totally interested in making this thing available to lots of people. AOL representing a cross-section of Middle America is the perfect audience for these games. So if there's anyway to make this happen, it seems like a smart thing to do."

The main obstacle developers admit is tough to overcome, creating a game with a meaning that gamers will choose to play over traditional, graphic shoot-'em-ups.

"When you're creating a game, you don't want people to know that they're learning something," said Theresa Riley of POV Interactive. "It's got to be happening from behind the scenes. That's why games are great because they get so caught up in the mechanic of the game, looking at winning and the goals involved in that, and then just the interactive experience itself and once they're caught up in that the learning happens in the background."

Since maybe the only device teenagers may spend more time with than their computers are their cell phones, there was some talk about how to move some educational content into them.

"I think that everything we're doing educationally could potentially be done through the cell phone," said Marc Prensky of Games2Train. "It's the most under-used platform that we have for learning, for education. It's something that's in people's pockets and apparently it's the only other thing than the wallet that people will go back home for if they forget it."

Check out the following links for some examples of "serious games":

www.netaid.org/youth/peter_packet/game.pt
www.gothamgazette.com/budgetgame/budgetgame.html
www.gothamgazette.com/breakdown/
www.netaidworldclass.org/kids/
www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2004/earth/index.html
www.tropicalamerica.com

 

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