Hi! I'm Andre Meadows, and this is Crash Course Games. In this series, we're going
to look at everything from the ancient games depicted on cave walls, to board games,
to the rise of the arcade machine, to home consoles, to virtual reality,
to role playing games and, hey nerds, even sports -- all games are created equal.
Games are used in schools and to treat medical conditions. They were used to train warriors for combat.
Some games have international tournaments, some even have very real political consequences.
There are games that you can play alone (tear)
And there are games that millions of people at a time can play together.
Some of these create a world -- some even have their own economics! Gaming affects millions of
players all over the world and makes an impact on popular culture and... "culture" culture!
I've got as many interesting game facts and stories for you as a Pokedex has Pokemon.
How many Pokemon are there now? Like 850-something? After 151 I am done.
So sit back, hit the pause button on whatever you're playing and prepare for a multi pixel journey through
the history of games. And remember: it's dangerous to go alone... take this!
[Theme Music]
Before we drop into all this like a misplaced tetrad, tetrazoid, tetrazone, tetris piece
We need to orient ourselves. We should answer a basic question: What is a game?
The dictionary will tell you 'a game is a construct that organizes play
through a series of rules for the purpose of achieving a set of goals overcoming an
obstacle and/or attaining an objective'. That's a decent definition. I would call
games "entertainment" but they're a very specific kind of "entertainment".
Game designer Chris Crawford came up with a really cool hierarchy to explain this.
To start, Crawford characterizes any kind of interactive entertainment as a play thing;
anything that you interact with to entertain yourself qualifies.
But there are also two types of playthings: a play thing without a goal like a slinky is a toy,
but when there's a goal involved like trying to get the slinky down the stairs, Crawford calls that a challenge.
Now if you're working to complete this challenge with no other active agent or person involved, it turns out you're working on a puzzle.
But when there is some kind of second party involved, then you have a conflict.
Ok, we're almost there. Crawford subdivides conflicts into competitions and games.
In a competition the participants don't interact or interfere with each other.
A good example of a competition is figure skating. Everybody's skating to win but they
can't really affect each other's performances.
Well, except for that one time with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan but, you know, look it up.
Mario Kart though, now that's a game. Players interact continuously, blocking and passing, and there's no
clearer example of interference than when you're in first place and one of your friends in 8th place
and they use a blue shell and take you out and take the leap. Why do you always do that to me, Katie?
It's not cool! And here's an interesting thing to think about:
You don't have to be playing against a person for something to be a game.
Those soldiers blocking your path in Metal Gear are artificial intelligence or AI
agents trying to stop you from accomplishing your goal.
The rules of solitaire can be constructed as an agent working to stop you
from completing the game. So games have goals like scoring points or saving the
princess and we achieve those goals by following the rules,
like moving our game piece six places if we roll a six on the die or ending
our turn if we've spent all of our mana. Of course none of this matters unless you want to play.
Voluntary participation is essential, otherwise it's work. I'd also like to get at why we play games,
but that's a little harder. The short answer is, there is no short answer. There is no
universal unified theory of why we play games. There's no constitution of gaming,
no ten commandments of gaming. Different games work on our brains in different ways.
Games like Tetris appeal to our desire to create order. Something like Animal Crossing lets us be the center of a whole tiny universe.
Games like World of Warcraft or Destiny let us live a remarkable life in another world.
Games like Candy Crush lets us crush candy. We play games for a lot of different reasons.
Let's leave behind the mystery of why we play for a while and talk about what can
a game be and what can a game do. Take video games.
Modern video games can be a bit formulaic but recent technological
advances have made games available to a wider audience and they've made the
tools to create games widely available and that's well... a game-changer! Get it?
A game-changer! You see cause we're talking games. A larger audience and a larger pool
of creators means a wider variety of games that get produced. Sure, you'll get
Call of Duty and the annual licensed NFL game that cost millions to make and sells millions
of copies but more gamers and lower production and distribution costs means
quirky games like Braid or Super Meat Boy or Shovel Knight. Games that might have
relatively small audiences can be profitable and sometimes those quirky
independent games can get so profitable and so popular that soon they hit a wide
audience just as much as a Triple A title. And when I say wide audience I mean WIDE audience.
In the United States alone there are around 145 million video game players.
37% of those players are over the age of 36 and 18% are under 18.
That kind of breaks the gamers stereotype, doesn't it? And increasingly games are part of players' daily lives.
According to video game academic Jane McGonigal by 2010 the average video game player in the US
played for 22 hours a week. That's like watching all the Harry Potter movies in order,
and then watching Chamber of Secrets again every week! That's a dedicated Harry Potter fan.
Clearly we're spending a lot of time playing video games so what's this doing to us?
We now have entire schools devoted to gaming and almost every major university offers classes and degrees related to games.
The University of Southern California, University of Utah, and Savannah College
of Art and Design all have renowned programs in game art, programming, and design.
The gaming industry makes so much money. Even more sometimes than movies and television!
There are even people right now on YouTube
who are making a living playing video games, on camera - that's a job! And it's not just
about learning how to make games or make money off of games. Massively multiplayer
game worlds can provide insights across disciplines. Sociologists can study how people form groups.
Economists can finally see if their models work.
And in 2005 World of Warcraft became a legitimate subject of study for epidemiologists.
Let's go to the Thought Bubble. In 2005 a plague hit World of Warcraft. The game's developers
introduced a new mission that called on players to defeat a boss named Hakkar the
Soulflayer, blood god of the Gurubashi trolls. Is Gurubashi right? Whatever.
When players attacked Hakkar, he cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which drained the players hit points.
The spell was intended to be contagious but it was only supposed to spread in that part of the game.
Well, it turns out Corrupted Blood was kind of like a real world pathogen and it got out of
the intended area and spread to the entire game world. According to an
article from Reuters the major towns and cities were abandoned by the population
as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the
countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses and the city
streets literally white with the bones of the dead.
This is where science got interested. The Journal of Epidemiology compared Corrupted Blood to
real-life SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Terrorism experts also studied the event.
They looked at the decision by some gamers to intentionally infect
other players and this provided some insight into how terrorist cells form in the real world.
In the end game developers had to invoke the nuclear option and
reset the game service to undo the havoc wrought by Hakkar the Soulflayer, blood
god of the Gurubashi trolls and, apparently, bio terrorist. Thanks, Thought Bubble!
Games also make their way into daily life through gamification.
This grows out of achievement systems some video games use to reward players in
addition to the normal game objectives. These systems have proven to be very motivational,
so why not try them out in real life? Purdue is doing this.
Some schools reward students with badges when they pass tests or complete
homework assignments. Gamification is also used in fitness. For example some
fitness apps award badges for walking around and even let users compete with
friends for the highest step count. Oh, that reminds me, hold on. This counts as steps, right?
Academic studies also seem to validate time spent gaming. Studies from China and Australia
indicate that expert-level video game players have a measurable increase in
cognitive functions, perception, and motor control. These players were found to have
increased gray matter and increased connectivity in their brains!
So next time your mom says you're playing too much video games, you go "hey mom I'm increasing my
gray matter." A hospital in Florida studied their surgeons who played video
games before performing surgery and found that surgeons who played video
games for more than three hours in a week made 37 percent fewer errors. They were 27
percent faster during surgery over those surgeons who did not. Gaming also has
cool applications in medicine. An Oxford University study indicated that playing
Tetris can reduce the after effects of psychological trauma and might offer relief
of PTSD symptoms. There's this virtual reality game called Snow World.
It's played on the Oculus Rift and it's used for pain management. Burn victims report
less pain during bandage removal and reapplication while playing this game.
Another example is the online game Fold It. In this game thousands of
players help doctors an computers fold proteins and other structures to support drug research.
In 2011 players helped scientists solve a decade old problem in under 10 days! That's the power of games!
So what we're saying here is that games can be a positive force in the world.
And that's why we're going to spend the next twenty weeks or so playing with these ideas.
So press Start or set up the board or tee up the ball or whatever. Let's play! Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next week. Now if you excuse me, I got some roads to crossy.
Crash Course Games is filmed in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana,
and it is made with the help of all these nice people. If you'd like to keep Crash
Course free for everyone forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support
the content you love. Speaking of patreon, we'd like to thank all our patreons in general, and we'd like to
specifically thank our high chancellor of knowledge Brett Henderson, MD, our headmaster
of learning Linnea Boyev, and our vice principal Mike Hunt. Thank you for your support.