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.
(Applause)