Continuing coverage of Games for Change Festival 2007. Yesterday's coverage is here

Funding Perspectives
Connie Yowell, MacArthur Foundation
Diana Rhoten, NSF
Allyson Knox, Microsoft
Lucy Bernholz (moderator)

Games, Civic Education, and Engagement
Joseph Kahne, Mills College
Doug Thomas, Tiltfactor
Angela [did not get her last name, sorry], Hunter College/Tiltfactor
Ben Stokes (moderator)

Gaming 21st Century Play - Are Games Rewiring Our Culture and Vice Versa?
Frank Lantz, Area Code
Karen Sideman, Parsons

Strategies for an Ecology of Change
Greg Costikyan, Manifesto Games
Katie Salen, gameLab institute of Play
Ken Wark, New School, Eugene Lang College
Carl Goodman (moderator)

Funding Perspectives
Connie: MacArthur funding program in digital media and learning. That's at the core of what we're doing. For games, three types of work:

One is research. We need research to demonstrate that games are worthwhile. It's critical that we shift our metrics in terms of how we understand the metrics, and also how we think about these environments in general so we are taking advantage of the tools and what they have to offer. You'll be seeing a series of research funded by MacArthur.

Second, thinking about what the new learning environment should look like. Games may also represent a new form of pedagogy, a way of teaching and not just a tool. What does that mean for the overall learning environment. We've made grants to the University of WIsconsin and others thinking about the next generation of learning environments.

Third, thinking about how you take those learning environments and use them to reshape institutions. Should the library look the same?, for example? Because of the power of games, they are getting us to think about new things.

Diana: I'm relatively new to the foundation. We've just been staffed up in my division and it details three core areas. High performance computing, visualization, and workforce development. I inherited a portfolio of grants in the latter area, and we have a solicitation out due in August from 250k up. Those programs are meant to focus K-20, but meant to train students to use computational tools and access instrumentation. Our mandate is science and engineering, but I've tried to expand that solicitation this year, so that it's not just about using those tools but also training and teaching.

The areas that we're thinking about for the future is more about cyber-learning and less about training. To date we've been rather conservative in this area. We're really pushing the notion of games for learning. We've funded some of this to date. From my office, we've funded the infrastructure, but less on content. We're trying to think about how we can build the right teams to connect with the content folks and integrate that work, working within our mandate. I'm thinking about collaborative teams and how we make that work. We're also really interested in games as an object of study, and to understand that we need better methodologies.

Alysson: We're interested in games for social change and not just entertainment. Microsoft has a citizenship world, some corporations turn that into a separate foundation, but for Microsoft it's part of our business plan, and we're social entrepreneurs in that sense.

I came from the non-profit world, and I think there's a lot of room for collaboration for corporations and foundations to collaborate. Also, continuing to extend our reach around the world.

Specifics: the program I'm part of is a $450 million commitment in 100 countries for learning. The major areas we're looking at are digital literacy, improved workforce, improved quality of life. We usually work with units of government (for example, Michigan requires all students to have an online learning experience). So in that case there's legislation and we funded a project to fit in that area. But I also have a group of entrepreneurial grantees, including Global Kids.

One point of entry could be the connection to the internet and scale. Issues and concerns: how do we know the quality of the games will be something we can put our mark on? How do we know who's going to do the testing? What is evaluation? We need to answer those. Also, what is the meaning students and adults are making out of this space? Do we want to be part of communicating those messages? Finally, how do we translate what it is we do into the language and form of traditional education?

Games, Civic Education, and Engagement
Doug: I was the co-PI on the Redistricting Game, with Chris Swain. We wanted to build something that produced at some leel civic engagement. Very early on in the prosss we created a cardboard prototype. And two of the developers were playing the game and started having an argument about whether or not you should vote in primary elections. And they thought they were getting off task, but I thought no, that was exactly what we wanted them to do. This got me thinking: what kind of game could we create that would get people to Google the constitution. And when people play, they start talking about those kinds of issues. It provokes you to engage in things that go beyond the game.

This is a time for a set of really important new collaborations to take place.

Joe: Looking at assessment and engagement with games.

Angela: Tiltfactor is a game lab at Hunter college and we work on social impact and activist games. We have NSF funding for a project called Values at Play, and we are trying to intervene in the design process and open the imagination of game designers. We are looking at building toolkits, design teams to help designers think harder about the challenges they are providing.

Ben: How do you think about the line between the real world and the game world?
Doug: That's like asking someone when they get in a car if they're in the driving world, or the non-driving world. This idea that there's some barrier between the real world and the virtual world that has to be crossed is exactly wrong.

A lot of what I'm trying to do now is show that dispositions are co-created. The kinds of things you do in a virtual world are done in relation to the identity you actually have.

Angela: I agree with that. I don't really think of having a virtual relationship with Henry David Thoreau

Joe: Within schooling, people ask a similar question: is school part of life or preparation for life? It does play both roles. In the civic realm, there's a new bar. Are there issues that can be dealt with in that world? For example, maybe it makes more sense to have students focus on civic issues in their school.

Ben: I'm interested in the boundary... the tactic of blurring the boundary between the real and game worlds, or the school and the rest of your life. Is this something we should be actively trying to do?

Doug: My knee-jerk reaction is always yes. But maybe the fact that we can fly in second life is not something we want to blur.

Ben: What about violence?

Doug: This is a tricky question. My response is that if you're going to be literal, it's a strange issue to deal with... the quantitative research I've read on this seems thoroughly confused and not very well done. That's one of the areas of research that's prone to get people chasing money, and I'm always suspicious of those kinds of agendas.

Ben: How does the state of what we know about learning compare to what we know about, say, violence in games?
Joe: There is a much more substantial body of literature on violence than on games for change. These are games different in content and in form than what is going on right now. The tighter the design of hte research, the less it parallels the real world, in general. So if you want really tightly controlled experiments, it stops looking like what kids actually want to do.

Doug: Say a 12 year old is playing a game about environmentalism, and 30 years later he's working at a plant and this affects his decision. If a game designer makes that game and it has that impact, it's worth the investment. But how do you determine that? Part of it might come from a feeling you get when you play the game. But these aren't quantifiable over a large sample. These are very difficult to measure in standard ways. We're not used to measuring games as persuasive. How do we do that? That's a question as well.

Gaming 21st Century Play - Are Games Rewiring Our Culture and Vice Versa?
Frank: The increasing presence of games in our culture is making changes in our world. You don't need to look ONLY at games whose ostensible goal is to make a change to find ones that have a powerfully beneficial effect in our lives

Gamer thinking: looking at the world as nonlinear dynamic thinking. Looking at the world not just as objects and surfaces but as information patterns. This is a particularly contemporary, modern, way of looking at the world.

[Note: i had to stop blogging to get some unexpected office work done. Sorry! Back shortly]

Strategies for an Ecology of Change
Greg: I've been a game developer for 30-something years. BUdgets have ballooned. $15-20mm for AAA console title. As cost skyrocket, publishers are less likely to take risk. Even when the publishers publish "original IP" they largely take an existing game genre they know how to sell and revise it. So I and a lot of game developers have gotten frustrated about this, and we decided that we have to break free of this and create what independent music and film have, smaller teams, lower budgets. Manifesto Games is trying to provide a path to market for those games.

We do a lot of games that are by no means Games for Change. We have a sex games section, becuase I don't see why games shouldn't be allowed to address any topics. Peacemaker is #2 on our bestseller list. We're open as long as we think those games would be of actual interest.

Carl: Do you hope to bring new audiences to games?
Greg: Yes, we have a diving simulation for example. If we can identify an audience and figure out how to get attention absolutely.

Carl: It seems that there might be a reason to have games with a social message in a place where other games also exist:
Greg: That's basically our theory, yes. Even with the sex games, most are sold through porn sites. Most people wouldn't find the game in another context.

Carl: There's still a ways to go with social change games. Are people paying for these games?
Greg: Our primary business model is a free version of some kind (demo) and if you like it you purchase it.

Carl: Is there a place for amateur games in social change?
Greg: THere should be obviously. One problem with these games is that they don't necessarily come from people with deep experience of games. If you can get a sense of passion in the game, that's a really good thing.

Carl: THe majority of games I'm seeing are simulation formats. Are there more options?
Greg: I'm surprised more hasn't been done with the graphical adventure. If you have a narrative there's still a lot of fans.

Carl:
Katie: I really want to talk about a project. But I found when I put together my thing today I'm still talking about theory. What's happening to me right now is that I'm trying to get my brain to move from one space to anwohter. Even thought I've been in the game space a long time the work I'm doing now is challenging me to think about how I'm going to get there.

Where do we locate the design of change? I think in order for change to happen you need to design the conditions nder which change happens. This means going beyond the idea of game... think about game vs. gaming. The whole activity of gaming, you enter into a whole ecology of interconnected ideas and theories and frameworks. When I've tried to look at the frame of gaming as a much larger space. For social change, people have to be involved in some way.

I've also started thinking about gaming as a social technology, a social context in which games are played. There's a whole history of social gaming, but there's something that happened when games went online that really changed our notion of the social fabric of gaming. This allowed us to see some things that were already there, but others were new. I've also had a recent realization working with Mimi Ito at USC. I realized that gaming is what Mimi calls an interest driven activity. I think social change needs to be an interest-driven activity too... you need to make an issue of interest to someone, in the way that they would choose to play a specific game.

There are three kinds of things for deep engagement:

A need to know about something
A need to share -- the space demands that they share their knowledge
An occasion to share -- an occasion where the knowledge has the opportunity to be shared.

What are the infrastructures we want to build across physical and online spaces that support certain kinds of networks and activities? It might not just be a game ... there are so many spaces.

This brings me to the idea of gamer intelligence, One idea is gaming literacies, and a number of people are working on this idea. THrough gaming practices there are a number of ways of engaging with the world that arise from the gaminess of games.

The institute of play has partnered with a small nonprovit to design a new 6-12 grade school themed around gaming. The idea is not that this is a school where kids play games in the classroom, but we're trying to extract this notion of gamer intelligence and create a pedagogy informed by game intelligence. What would that look like? We really feel like a school as an institution becomes a location for change, a synthesizing site.

Ken: I teach media studies. By studying the reaction to a medium, you can create a better medium... one for social utility, one for profitability. Two camps: an instrument, by shaking it you can manage, and a critical school arguing why that doesn't work. One of the largest research areas in the social sciences has been the instrumental mode. I maintain that even though no one invested a dime in the critical argument.

Adorno. Wrote largely unintelligible essays in German. Stuart Hall argued in the 70s that the way media texts are encoded bear no relationship to the way people decode it. The culture people come from affects the way they decode it. One thing nobody sort of never did was to take the critical component to the people as well. So rather than report on, could you construct spaces where people have access to the artifact and the process of thinking about that. Stuard Hall taught at the Open University in London, which is basically a university on television.

I did this little project called Gamer Theory. And I want to talk about games as form. Because you have no way of controlling how your audience uses your games. Propaganda doesn't work. I wanted to construct a space to think about the form of games, and I don't think anything interesting happens at the level of content. What games tell you about is the form of the game. What you'll make of the content is contingent.

Where I really wanted to get to was the limit of thinking about the space of the game. Thinking about game as a valid kind of knowledge is one way of approaching social change and games. But, where is the space where we think about the limits of that. I would love to see a game that is also about the limits of what games can show. That would show real sophistication in games. One thing games are not doing is talking about their own form. And the hallmark of maturity of form is asking that question.

The way the website worked was a bit gamelike. The chapters were alphabetical and had to be around a concept that started with an a,b, or c. The comment field would always be attached to the paragraph. I wanted the commentary to attach to that level of thought. It's not a wiki. Critical thought is not about consensus. It's not about a blog, because it's not about argumentation or perception. So, I thought we needed to invent new forms for critical thought. And games are the medium that best explains the moment we are in. I think we need to understand algorithmic form and their limits.

Can we create spaces where people can think about a game. We also tried visualization of the text but it didn't really work.

Carl: Somebody used an algorithmic process to make the text look like a level of Super Mario Bros.
Ken: Yeah, but there's another one where you see the writing.

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