Transcriber: Bob Prottas Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Hi, I'm Karl Kapp
and I want to talk to you about life lessons from video games.
I believe video games can teach us all kinds of lessons.
Several years ago I was teaching middle school kids business concepts
using the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon.
In that game in order to run a profitable park,
you have to have of course a roller-coaster.
You have to have merry-go-rounds.
You have to have that kind of thing.
But you also have to have certain amenities like trashcans,
you have to have restrooms, you have to have benches,
in order to do that because you get happy customers.
And happy customers stay in your park longer
and they spend more money.
So I was teaching kids about that.
I was looking around the room and it surprised me that one group of kids
had a lot of happy customers,
but they had none of the amenities
that I thought they should have.
There was no bathrooms, no benches.
So, I walked up to them and I said,
'How do you guys do that?
Don't you get unhappy customers?'
And they're like 'Oh, yeah, we do get unhappy customers,
but we just take care of them.'
(Laughter)
I said, 'What do you mean you take care of them'.
They said, 'Here, let us show you,'
with the exuberance of middle school students.
And I said, 'Let me see.'
They said, 'Well, we bring up this list of all the customers in the park,
we find an unhappy customer.
And we take that unhappy customer and we grab them
and they took them over a lake
and then dropped them into the lake.
(Laughter)
I said, 'You drown unhappy customers?' (Laughter)
They said, 'Yeah, the game lets us do it.'
(Laughter)
So at this point, some of you are thinking
'Yeah, I knew it, video games are pretty violent.
Even something as benign as a roller-coaster game,
and they're killing people. (Laughter)
And if that was the whole story, I'd have to agree with you.
But that's not the whole story about video games,
and that's not the whole story about these kids drowning customers.
While we hear a lot about the negative aspects of video games
there's a lot of positive aspects of video games that I'd like to talk about.
In fact, there's a growing body of research
about many positive aspects of video games.
For example, the video game World of WarCraft
was mentioned in the Harvard Business Review
as a tool for teaching virtual leadership
and virtual team building skills.
The game Minecraft,
which many of you may play with your kids or grandkids
is being used to teach math and geometry all over the country.
The game Rise of Nations was a topic of a study.
They took 40 non-gamers
average age of 69 years old, had them play this game
and found out it increased their mental acumen
in terms of switching tasks,
reasoning and short-term memory.
Action based video games like Assassin's Creed,
actually people that play those
have ability to make decisions
25% faster without sacrificing accuracy
as people who don't play action based video games.
So there's a lot of value in video games.
Many, many years ago I was playing a video game with my son
and it was a game where you took off from the aircraft carrier
flew past some enemy airplanes
around ships and to an island.
It was a game that really caused me a lot of problems
because I couldn't take off of that stupid aircraft carrier.
(Laughter)
Every time I tried to get my airplane
it was shot down again and again and again.
I just could not do it.
I looked away for a moment,
my 8 year old son was playing the game
and he got half way to the island with his airplane unscathed.
I said, 'Nate, how did you take off from this aircraft carrier?
I cannot take off.'
He said, 'Dad, I didn't take off.'
I said, 'What do you mean you didn't take off?'
He said, 'Here, I'll show you.'
And he proceeded to taxi his airplane
off the left hand side of the aircraft carrier
right onto the ocean.
And he drove his airplane past the ships,
too low for the airplanes to get him.
I couldn't believe it, he had found a flaw in the game
that was so outside of my realm of consciousness
and the consciousness of the developers,
we couldn't even fathom it.
To me, if you're sitting in an airplane
as a pilot, on an aircraft carrier,
you really only have one choice.
It's to take off.
And what that taught me was to think about
are constraints our own
or are we constrained by the environment around us?
So video games let us think through these constraints
and let us get outside of what is conventional.
And think unconventional things.
I call that lesson 'Drive on the Ocean.'
So, I want you to think about driving on the ocean.
Another really interesting game that really helps prove that point
is a game called 'foldit.'
Now foldit was developed at the University of Washington.
The idea behind this game -- it's a serious game
And in fact, a number of years ago,
players playing this game
actually figured out the structure
that helped with HIV research.
In fact, they discovered something that had stymied HIV researchers
for literally decades.
Yet, by playing this game they were able to do that.
So, whether the game is by design or accidental
it can teach us to drive on the ocean
and think the impossible.
It's kind of like what Louis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,
She said, 'You know, sometimes I believe
in as many as 6 unbelievable things before breakfast.
(Laughter)
And I think she was playing video games.
(Laughter)
So, video games can also give us a different perspective on our lives.
Often times when we play a video game
we're looking over our own shoulder.
That's called the Third Person perspective.
Now sometimes we drop and we look in the first person.
But more often than not we're in third person.
And we do that because Third Person gives us wider control.
It give us a wide perspective
and it lets us know where we fit into the larger environment.
It turns out this is actually really good for us
from a research perspective.
Dr. Lisa Libby at Ohio State University
did a study where she had some people --
she took college kids and she asked them how many of them
thought that they were socially awkward in High School.
So she grabbed these kids
who self identified themselves as socially awkward.
Which made me wonder like who didn't identify themselves
(Laughter) as socially awkward?
But I guess there're some.
But anyway, they identified themselves as socially awkward.
She had them imagine a socially awkward situation from High School.
Some in first person, some in third.
The people that recalled it in third person
subsequently indicated that they had changed dramatically
since that embarrassing event.
They had more confidence.
But the people who imagined it in first person
didn't have the same level of confidence.
They didn't see themselves as having changed quite as much.
In another experiment they took people who were going to vote
and they had them imagine themselves voting.
Some again in third person, and some again in first person.
The people that actually went out and voted
were the people that imagined themselves voting in third person.
On a personal note, I was in a meeting one time that was particularly contentious.
We felt that the customer was wrong about some request that they had.
They felt that we were wrong.
We weren't going to compromise in that old thing the customer is always right.
And I was literally seeing red. I was so upset.
But I took a moment and I stepped back
and I looked over my own shoulder at my body language,
at the body language of my boss,
at the body language of the customers.
And in that moment I got the clarity
that helped to solve that problem
by simply looking at it that way.
It's kind of like the New York Times journalist Ben Casey says.
He says that viewing yourself in a movie or a play,
and I'll add a video game,
is not merely indulgence or fantasy,
but it's fundamental to working out who we are
and who we will become.
I call this lesson 'Widen Your Perspective.'
Take a moment and sit back and widen your perspective
as you go through your day and go through your life.
Think of how you're interacting.
So now let's get back to those kids
who are very happily drowning unhappy customers.
(Laughter)
About 10 minutes after I had gone ahead and talked to them
and they had bragged about drowning the customers,
they came up to me and said, Dr. Kapp we've got a major problem.
You know crises that only a middle school kid could have.
We've got this major problem, we're going bankrupt.
I said, 'You're going bankrupt?'
They said, 'Yes, can you help us?'
So I went over and found out
that they were actually drowning customers at a higher rate
than new customers were coming into the park.
(Laughter)
What they really should've been doing was converting customers
instead of drowning them.
And I asked them what they felt would make this more balanced.
And one young lady, very intuitively said 'balance'.
We need to have more balance.
You can not use one measure of success for success.
You need to use multiple measures of success.
And so I called that lesson 'Don't Drown your Customers.'
(Laughter)
So those are 3 simple lessons
we can take away from video games.
And the homework I want to give to you
is that next time you play a video game
I want you to think about the life lessons that are in that video game.
I want you to take them and I want you to share them with other.
Thank you.
(Applause)