Transcriber: Helen Chang Reviewer: Ivana Korom I'm 36 years old. My first experience with the video game business was neighbors who were wealthier than us bringing home an Atari 2600 and playing it. It was a pretty definitive moment for me.
I also remember going to school, and on an Apple 2, playing a game called "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego", an awesome game, which was the first time I played the game in the school context. When you ask people about the video game business and what's significant, most people think that Atari 2600 is really the nexus, the catalyst of the video game business. But I think that "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" is probably the most important video game ever made, principally because it was the first and the last time that parents, teachers and kids all agreed that a video game was awesome.
(Laughter) Now, that was a long time ago. In fact, it was 1987. It may surprise you to know that "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego" continues to be the last substantial giant hit in the entertainment business, despite the fact that it was 1987, which is such an incredibly long time ago.
I am only 36. You can do the math. Things are completely different today from what they were.
Just as a simple example, in 1987, we thought this guy was kind of crazy. Then we met this dude, who's really changed our perspective on that subject. (Laughter) Things have changed.
(Laughter) (Applause) Anti-Bush political humor goes a long way in Western Europe. Okay. (Laughter) So, between 1987 and now, I played a lot of this game, called "Civilization", which was designed by a guy named Sid Meier.
In fact, I spent about 8 to 10,000 hours of my life playing "Civilization", which is a long time I probably should have spent studying. But nonetheless, I managed to turn this love of video games into a job. First working on the Game Developers Conference, helping to start the first, successful, digital distribution company in games, called TRYMEDIA, and now, writing Gamification Blog.
I'm author of two books on the subject of Gamification, including the recent "Gamification by Design", published by O'Reilly. And, I chaired the Gamification Summit, an event that brings all this stuff together. In many ways, I am parents' dream of how somebody can turn a sedentary lifestyle, playing video games, into an actual career that pays real money.
When I get invited to an event like this, I'm sure that all of you expect me to get up here and say, "Games are awesome for your children. " Right? Because I'm a game's guy and this is how I make my living.
(Applause) Games will help children. But instead, I want to ask you a different question, which is really who needs game's help? I started this process by thinking about reading a particular article in the New York Times recently.
In the article, a neuroscientist was talking about how children were presenting themselves with Attention Deficit Disorder. Their parents would come in and say, "My kids can't possibly have ADD, because they're super good at focusing on video games. " But when they go to school, they were really bad.
The neuroscientist was debunking this idea. Right in the article, she trotted out researchers like Dr Christopher Lucas at NYU, who said games don't teach the right kind of attention skills where kids have sustained attention where they're not receiving regular rewards. She trotted out experts like Dr Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington, who said that kids who play a lot of video games may find the real world unpalatable, uninteresting, as a result of their sensitization to games.
So I sat there and I thought to myself, I'm scratching my head, and I thought to myself, is it that our children have ADD or is our world just too freaking slow for our children to appreciate? (Applause) Seriously, consider the picture you're looking at right now, like in my era, even my grandfather's era, sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to read a good book with a cup of tea - I just have to say, I don't think that today's kids are ever going to do that. The evidence is found in the games they play.
Consider the video game "World of Warcraft", When I was growing up, the maximum skill that I was expected to display in a video game, was simple hand eye coordination, a joystick and a firing button. Today's kids play games, in which they're expected to chat in text and voice, operate a character, follow long- and short-term objectives, and deal with their parents' interrupting them all the time and talk to them. (Laughter) Kids have to have an extraordinary multitasking skill to be able to achieve things today.
We never had to have that. It turns out things like that actually make you smarter. Research by Arne May at University Regensburg in Germany found that when they gave participants - this was actually done on adults - simple task to learn, like juggling, in 12 weeks, people who were asked to learn juggling displayed a marked increase in gray matters in their brain.
On an MRI, you can see people get more gray matter after 12 weeks of learning juggling. In 2008, they went back and redid the study to see why the gray matter increased. They discovered it was the act of learning that produced the increased brain matter, not performance at the activity itself, which is a very interesting finding.
It also reinforced this idea, which should go over well here as well, that multi-lingual people outperform mono-lingual people on most standardized tests by about 15%. There's something that happens in the brain from that kind of activity. Andrea Kuszewski, speaking at Harvard, talked about these five things that people do to increase their brain matter, to teach themselves, to increase their fluid intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is the intelligence we use to problem solve. It's different from crystalline intelligence, it helps us problem solve. She identified, from the research, that there were 5 things you could do - seek novelty, challenge yourself, think creatively, do things the hard way, and network.
Think about those 5 things. Any of you play video games? Does it resemble the basic pattern of a video game to you in any way?
These are 5 things that recur in all very successful video games. It also was connected to a constant and exponential increase in learning. Video games fundamentally present a continuous process of learning to users.
They don't just learn for a little while and then stop. They're constantly evolving and moving forward. It may help us to explain the "flynn effect", finally.
The flynn effect, for those of you who don't know, is the pattern that human intelligence is actually rising over time. So, if we look at the history of IQ, people are getting smarter. In the US right now, average IQ is rising at .
36 points of IQ per year. What has been very interesting is that in some countries - not to call anyone out but Denmark and Norway - In some countries, overall crystalline IQ has stopped or slowed down or declined. In other countries though, particularly when looking at fluid IQ, fluid intelligence, the number is increasing.
The rate of fluid intelligence increase is increasing, starting in the 1990s. Coincidence? I think not.
(Laughter) In fact, games are wired to produce a particular kind of reaction in people. We got this learning brain increase, multitasking brain increase connection, and we also have a strong dopamine loop in the brain. As games present a challenge, and you struggle to achieve that challenge and you overcome it, dopamine is released in your brain.
That produces an intrinsic reinforcement - in the words of Judy - that produces an intrinsic reinforcement, that causes you to go back and keep seeking that activity over and over again. So, this is really powerful stuff. I want to introduce you to an educator, who understands this in intricate detail, named Ananth Pai.
Ananth was a very successful business person, who worked on process reengineering. When his kids went into school in White Bear Lake, Minnisota, a suburb of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, he saw the education system and decided he wanted to do something about it. As an adult, he went back and got a master in Education, and took over a class at White Bear Lake Elementary School.
Ananth Pie replaced the standard curriculum with the video game based curriculum of his own design. Separating the kids into leaning styles, and giving them Nintendo DS's and computer games. Everything off the shelf, nothing custom.
Giving them Nintendo DS's and computer games that were both individual and social to play, that taught them math and language. Let me tell you what happened. In this base of 18 weeks, Mr Pie's class went from a below 3rd-grade level in reading and math, to a mid-4th-grade level in reading and math.
In 18 weeks of a game based curriculum. More importantly, when you talk to the children, when they're interviewed on television, even away from Mr Pie, when they're interviewed on television, they say two things over and over again, that helps them learn in his class: learning is fun, and learning is multi-player. Whether they use those exact words or not, they say learning if fun and learning is multi-player.
This is the key in making that experience really successful for kids. It's also true though that we need to talk about the relationship between kids and violence in games. Study after study, very clearly tells you, that violent games do not make children violent.
We also must acknowledge, however, that if you have a child predisposed to violence, violent games may help make them a better violent child. If they train kids to do other things, they also would train that. We need to accept that.
We need to understand the connection between games as a form of training. We can't blanket, say that they don't affect kids. It's not true.
I'd like to call the group of people who are driving this trend forward "Generation G". There're 126 million Millennials in the United States and the EU, plus younger kids we can't yet count, that form Generation G. And the way that Generation G is different from X, Y, and all the different generations that we may belong to, is that video games are the primary form of entertainment that Generation G is consuming.
It is their primary form of entertainment. This is already starting to have a tremendous effect on society. All around us, generation G's desire for game-like experiences is reshaping industries.
From Foursquare, which caused the mobile social networking ecosystem to start, to companies like Nike, Coke, Chase, and also Koxinga, which owes much of its success to games. The trend that underlies this whole pattern is called Gamification. It's a word that many of you have heard.
A simple definition of gaminfication is it's the process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. Part of the reason why gamification has become such an emerging topic right now is because Generation G's effect on culture and society already. Their expectations are different.
Some examples of gamification that you may have seen, that are really fascinating to me, are the emergence of in-dashboard games in cars. Today, if you buy a hybrid or an electric vehicle, you'll almost certainly see the product of a hundred million dollars worth of tooling and research and development, in the form of a Tamagotchi style game, in a dashboard designed to make you a more ecological driver. It's simple.
Most of the game mechanics are very simple. A plant grows as you drive more ecologically, and withers if you don't, like those virtual pets Tamagotchi. This is an example of gamification at work.
Another really interesting example, is a thing called Speed Camera Lottery, designed by Kevin Richardson, based in San Francisco, works for MTV. Awesome guy. This is the concept in speed camera lottery - you know those speeding cameras, that you pass by, they take your picture and send you a ticket?
In many Scandinavian countries, the ticket you get is actually based not only on how fast you were going, but how much money you make. So, the more you make, the bigger the ticket. Kevin re-engineered a speeding camera in Sweden, that instead of just giving tickets to people who drive over the speed limit that past the camera, anybody who drives under the limit is entered into a lottery to win the proceeds of the people who speed.
(Laughter) It is game thinking - that term I described earlier - the core foundation of gamification. It is game thinking, in its purest and most beautiful form - take a big negative reinforcement loop, and turn it into small incremental positive reinforcement loop. It had the effect of dropping speed by over 20% at that point of intervention.
Corporations have also become aware of the trend of gamification, and the effect games on people, like Generation G. Gartner Group says that, by 2015, 70% of all global 2000, the biggest companies in the world, will be actively using gamification, and 50% of their process of innovation will be gamified, which is an astonishing thing. It's a huge change.
What this all points to is a future that looks pretty different from the world that we live in today. Generation G, and those driving the gamification moving forward, are advocating for a different world. It's a world in which things move at faster pace than it did for you and me.
It's a world in which there're rewards everywhere for actions that people take. The rewards don't always have to be cash rewards. They can be meaningful status rewards, meaningful access rewards, meaningful power rewards.
A world in which there's extensive collaborative play. This is one of the things that Generation G does so much differently than even my generation. I remember going to school and teachers struggling to come up with exercises that we could do as a team that would be graded as a team.
Right? In the end, those group exercises always boil down to an individual score, which distorted the way that people behaved. But, Generation G plays a lot of games that are purely collaborative, in which there is group value.
This will also affect our world in untold ways. Generation G, the fun future, is a much more global world. It turns out that we are already out of touch.
We are the generation most out of touch with our future or current children than any generation in history. We like to think that baby boomers' parents were the most out of touch people in the world. They're the ones who had to deal with the like, summer of love, sex, drugs, and all that kind of stuff.
We still make phone calls. (Laughter) I mean, we are the ones with the problem. We are going to be the most out of touch generation in history.
Of course, it's also true, and I'm here to tell you, I will be the one to tell you, the kids are alright. They're going to be just fine. We don't need to worry, strictly speaking, about kids and games, and the effect it'll have on the world, Not just are the kids are going to be alright, frankly, the kids are going to be awesome.
But it's going to take your help to make the kids awesome. I have a prescription for you. This is the best prescription anybody is ever going to write in your life.
I'm going to write it for you right now, in your mind, I don't have an actual pad. Just for clarity, a disclaimer, I'm not a doctor. (Laughter) I am going to write a prescription for you all.
This is the prescription. If you have children, or you work with children, or you desire to work with children, or you want to change he world, this is the absolute positive best thing that you can do with your time, from now until I see you in the retirement home, on the coast of Spain, or in the virtual world, wherever you choose to retire. Which is - get into the game with your kids.
Stop fighting the game trend, if that's where you are right now. Don't fight the game trend. Become one with the game.
Enter the game. Understand it. Understand the dynamic of how your children play the games that they play.
Understand how their minds work from the context of the game outward rather than from the world outside inward. The world that we live in right now, the world that Sunday afternoons, drinking a cup of herbal tea, reading some old book, chilling out by the window, is over. (Laughter) And that's okay.
There's a lot more things that we can do that are fun and engaging. If you take away one thing from today's presentation, I hope it is you get a chance to go play with your kids. Thank you.
