>>When you're playing a game there's this natural inclination
as you become better and better to start engaging
in the world in different ways.
Now part of that is simply to recruit other people to game with, right.
So, if you're playing something like Civilization there's a point
at which you need to have other players to kind
of push your understanding, push your strategy,
same thing in Guild or multiplayer games.
What I'm most interested in though is this idea that when you play
through a game world, let's say that you're playing as a roleplaying game
and you're a character who's shaped this entire world.
We are starting to see some evidence that players after playing games
like this will start to kind of put down the computer or look outside
and say, "Well, why are things the way they are?
Why is the economic system or the political system the way it is,"
if you've been playing Civilization."
So, what we want to do with educational games are design games
that try to do that, but really build them around critical,
kind of current issues, and then get kids to be motivated
and have the skills to go out and start to solve these problems
as a direct result of having played the game.
>>I study video games and learning and I'm particularly interested
in how video games function as learning environments,
how game cultures around them function,
and then can we design learning environments based on those ideas.
So, partly what we try to do is design games for learning,
but then also design kind of social organizations around them.
So, a lot of this is more than just taking games and trying
to stick them, say, in a school, but it's really
to fundamentally rethink how we do education.
>>One thing about games is they're really good at peaking your interest.
They're really good at taking a complex sort of subject area
and then giving you a hook into it so that you find it intriguing
and you kind of maybe see the puzzle in it.
And then they're really good drawing people
in so they become engaged and evolved.
They're very immersive.
>>The next thing that games do that's really interesting is
that they actually build skills, you have to be good at a game.
People who play games develop pattern detection skills,
they develop problem-solving skills.
You don't get very far in a game if you just think
about doing one sort of solution path.
You've got to kind of step back when you reach problems,
look at what is the most ideal kind of solution,
and then given what you're skills are,
what is the best way to go forward.
>>Kids in online spaces are really having the opportunity to take
on adult kinds of roles and do a lot of complex sort
of information management.
If you ever tried to organize a raid and get a hundred people from all
over the world to show up at the same time, on time, to be prepared,
to have all the things they need, to not mess up the group,
to stay disciplined, it's really a complex kind of activity, right.
And there are 13- 14-year-old kids around the world
who are doing that right now.
>>In games you have the capacity to do all these kinds of things, right.
So, you can get involved in this guild and help write the charter
and kind of develop the rules.
In schools, unfortunately, we still have almost all of that
on either the teacher or increasingly the federal government, right.
We don't say that, as kids, alright let's build your own constitution,
let's build a charter, let's come up with your rules.
Kids generally aren't running the school board,
and that's what's happening in games, right.
Kids are, literally, they're getting to participate
and shape their own social futures, shaping the social future
of their organization, and they're having a chance to do it.
>>I think to me most interesting is when you see spaces
that are cross-generational, right.
So, if you actually see guilds where you have kids doing that,
but then there's also grownups there too.
And our society is really bad about age degradation.
We have to say all the ninth graders can be in a room, not even ninth
and tenth graders can be in the room.
We unfortunately, if you're learning physics,
there's one physics teacher and 30 kids.
What's great about games is that there are all these matching
of people of different abilities, different interests,
all working together in this kind of ad hock way,
which is how learning happens everywhere except for school, right.
That's how learning has always happened before nineteen hundred,
it's how learning will probably happen from here on out.
>>Listen to me, this is a peace party.
I want you to invite every man, woman and child to our bueatiful city
to protest and to rally against taking away human rights.
>>When most people think about games
and civic engagement they think those two things kind of have--
nothing could have less to do with one another
than video games and civic engagement.
But actually there seems to be a small, but important,
relationship between them.
And I think as educators we can leverage what games do
and really foster civic engagement.
>>We have a game, for example, called Citizen Science.
And this is a game where you're roleplaying as an average citizen.
It takes place here in Madison.
And what you do in the game is that you come to learn that the lakes
in this area are very endangered, which in fact they are.
They may become eutrophic in a few years to the point
where you can't swim in them at all.
And so what you do in the game is that you're a kid who goes
through a series of quests
to understand what's happening to the lake.
And then if you go through it right you actually change the lake
and change the future.
Now, our hope is that you play the game, you put it down, and you say,
"Oh, well, why don't we do something about it?"
So, we've basically taught you how to do everything you're going to need
to do to change the lake.
We've taught you what the root causes are, how the science works,
who you have to talk to to get legislation passed.
And so what we're hoping is that by the end we'll have kind of a mass
of students who are interested in the topic, they feel empowered,
they have the skills, and then they're actually motivated
to go do something about it.
>>Something that we've been seeing happening here that's really
interesting is that a lot of the media messaging
and the organization is being taken up, of course,
by kids and they're using media to do it, things like Twitter.
And because the social events and protests and rallies
that are happening here have largely been driven by grassroots,
it's largely been driven by participatory media,
the mainstream media is not covering it, so we have the largest rally
in the history of Wisconsin last weekend.
And at best Fox News had one camera.
CNN cut away for about ten seconds, right.
And as people are realizing that okay,
the corporate-owned mass media is not going to get our message out,
we need other ways to do it.
>>Woman: I think I would try and convince him to just negotiate
and stop being so proud and stubborn.
>>Man: I'd tell him to listen to the people of the state.
>>Man: If I had to say something, I'd say, "As much as you want to deny it,
these are your constituents."
>>Woman: I would tell him he needs to stop and listen
to the people of Wisconsin.
Don't get me started.
>>You see things like mobilization and using Twitter.
You see people sharing-- producing videos and sharing videos
to get their message out.
That sort of instinct to do that I think comes in part from growing
up with participatory media like games, but now a generation
of kids actually has many of these skills
and so they're starting to do it.
And they're starting to kind of fill that void
where other media aren't stepping up.
>>A group of our students launched a website because they realize
that information was really hard to get and it was not freely available
in the capital, so they launched a website overnight that let you know
where the protests were happening,
what was needed, anyone could post to it.
It was featured on CNN by the next day, and, of course,
the capital had restricted access to it because it was deemed
to be perhaps a little controversial.
And this is something, as a gamer, people kind of actually do.
They look and they say well where are the weak spots, what do we need
to fix, and they are inclined to kind of jump in and apply their skills
to try get something done.
>>Well, a lot of the skills are really related to design.
Really good players, if they're playing collaboratively,
have to form teams, for example, right.
So, they have to design their own team,
they have to design their own kind of team rules, they have to guild,
they have to write a charter.
They have to build a website, they have to recruit people.
So, they're designing their own sort of social systems.
Now, the skills that go into that involve a lot of things.
So, one is information gather and information management.
So, when you're doing this kind of gaming you're having to monitor a lot
of information streams, choose which ones you think are relevant,
and then make decisions so to manage your own information flow coming in.
So, if you're playing something like World of Warcraft,
having to customize your interface to get the information that you need
to do better is a fundamental skill,
it happens in something like Starcraft as well.
It's very similar to doing civic participation in the sense
of what kind of information am I getting, where can I get more,
what don't I know, what are other, if you have a strong feeling on one side
of an issue, do you know enough about what the other side, say, is doing,
do you know enough about kind of what's happening
from different information sources.
That's part of why I think games are such a key piece
of what we call a participatory media,
the idea that you are actually shaping the content,
shaping the experience, helping shape the world.